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Gigabyte 7VTX
KT266 Background This review is updated on 3 Apr 2001 running the benchmarks using a new BIOS and mainboard. Gigabyte announces another Socket A DDR solution. This time round, it's 7VTX, a Socket A DDR board for the new generation Duron and Thunderbirds. GA-7VTX is based on the long awaited VIA KT266 chipset. So, how will it compare with GA-7DX/7DXR and the rest of the AMD DDR boards based on ALi MAGiK1 and AMD 760. That is what we are going to investigate in the next few pages. Before we take a look at the package and specifications, let's take a look at this new chipset. The VIA Apollo KT266 consists of the VT8366 North Bridge Controller and VT8233 South Bridge Controller. The chipset provides the highest performance and most scalable chipset solution for the latest AMD Athlon™ processors with a 266MHz Front-Side Bus, it also incorporates something that is unique of VIA's technology which is V-Link Hub Architecture. Basically what is does is that this V-Link bus links the North and South Bridge and communicate with a bandwidth of 266MB/s and removed the previous 33Mhz PCI bus bottleneck. This is indeed a high speed path for the communication between North and South bridges. In fact, this chipset supports both the traditional PC-100/PC-133 and the new PC1600/PC2100 DDR RAM. Some of the other goodies of this chipset involves six USB port support, AC97 for audio and modem, hardware monitoring, ACPI/OnNow power management etc. Let's take a look at the block diagram.
Related Reviews : ASUS A7A266 ALi MAGiK1 19 Mar 2001 |
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