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Soltek SL75DRV KT266 This review is updated on 18 Apr 2001 to reflect the latest benchmark results obtained when a resistor is removed from the mainboard. Introduction Recently, a number of websites including OCworkbench have reviewed the new kids of the block - the KT266 mainboards. The results obtained were quite different. Some websites were arguing about having BIOS upgrades will solve the problems. Well to a certain extent it is true. Anyway, we will take a look at what Soltek has to offer this time round. Soltek SL75DRV is based on the long awaited VIA KT266 chipset. So, how will it compare with the rest of the AMD DDR boards based on ALi MAGiK1, AMD 760 and VIA KT266. 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 : Gigabyte 7VTX KT266 3 Apr 2001 ASUS A7A266 ALi MAGiK1 19 Mar 2001 |
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