by Anna Filatova
07/24/2002 | 02:50 AM
One more VIA chipset for Athlon platforms, VIA KT400, started shipping to the mainboard makers. At the same time the official announcement of the chipset may be delayed upon the manufacturers’ request, as they have just started shipping in mass quantities the products based on the previous VIA KT333 solution.
According to our sources in Taiwan, KT400 is nearly ready and all the leading mainboard manufacturers have almost completed the work on their boards based on it. VIA KT400 will boast more up-to-date features than all its predecessors, which implies that the solutions based on it will be pretty popular. Besides the support of DDR400 SDRAM, which will be implemented in the new KT400, the chipset will also feature AGP 8x bus and use faster V-Link with 533MB/sec bandwidth. For the South Bridge to be shipped with the new chipset VIA decided on VT8235 supporting new V-Link, ATA/133 and USB 2.0.<%BANNER[article]%>
Our colleagues in ASUS shared with us a picture of the new VIA KT400 based mainboard aka ASUS A7V8X. It is expected to start selling in autumn, when the KT400 chipset is officially out.
I would like to stress that A7V8X will be a product with very broad features. The only thing we could probably complain about is the absence of an IDE RAID controller onboard. However, besides the standard DDR400, AGP 8x, USB 2.0 and ATA/133, the mainboard will also boast: SerialATA 150 protocol implemented via an integrated controller from Promise, IEEE 1394 ports implemented via VIA VI6307 controller and 10/100Mbit Ethernet by Broadcom controller. Also the mainboard will support 6-channel AC’97 sound and monitor processor status via a special thermal diode integrated into the Athlon XP CPU.