|
War of the Chipsets (1) If you remember early this year, ALi MAGIK1 was released and it was one of the first chipsets that supports AMD Socket A DDR platform. It did have success over the first 5 months attracting some of the big guys out there who supported the ALi platform, some of them are ASUS, SOYO, Iwill just to name a few. The performance was pretty good and is a cheaper alternative to the AMD761 chipset. Around April, VIA also launched it's DDR chipset and it was widely accepted as the de-facto standard by the Taiwanese manufacturer. Almost every Taiwanese manufacturer will have a KT266 solution. In fact, it was somewhat delayed by almost 4 months as it was announced quite early this year. If you remember, we also uncovered some stories of design flaws of manufacturers and this really upset some people out there. When VIA KT266 is out, many manufacturers rushed to it, embrace it and launched their product and some held on and waited as they heard something during Computex 2001 that there is a new stepping known as KT266Pro. Some sites out there rebutted us but we are quite confirmed that even if it is not known as KT266Pro, it will still be a newer stepping with improved performance. That is probably why some mainboard manufacturers held on to their KT266 DDR solutions. Almost at the same time, SiS sent most of the online media early samples of their SiS735 DDR board. In fact we saw some early benchmarks in a powerpoint slide and we wondering if the benchmark results are true as it shows SiS735 toppling all DDR chipsets out there. We received the board and did a test ourselves and we were surprised by the performance of this single chipset. It surpasses all the current chipsets and is crown as the King of DDR when ECS released it's first SiS735 solution - ECS K7S5A. Almost every media gave the SiS735 good remarks in terms of low price and excellent performance. In August 2001, we received a reference board of ALi MAGiK1 b0 stepping and the performance jumped by almost 10% compared to it's first release A1 stepping of ALi MAGiK1. Watching the DDR chipset war is really exciting. Today VIA officially announces the KT266A, the new stepping of KT266. So, will the KT266A be a better performer than the other 3 ? We will investigate it in terms of Memory Bandwidth, CPU, FPU, Content Creation and 3D performance benchmarks. On the next page, we describe the new KT266A. Below is a comparison chart of AMD760, KT266A and SiS735
|
|
Copyright 1998-2003
|
