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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: KT600 At One Glance Features VRM, Layout Sound and SATA BIOS 1 BIOS 2 Test Configurations Memory Benchmarks Cachemem I/O Performance WB99 results Winstones Gaming Performance Overclocking, Conclusions Flame Us
ASUS A7V600 The Return of Apollo?
(Review by MS, August 7, 2003)

After leading a wallflower existence over the past few months, VIA is back to challenge the nVidia dominance in the Socket A domain. A redesigned memory controller capable of withstanding more than 230 MHz operating frequency along with expanded USB 2.0 capacity and finally the native Serial ATA support, including SATA RAID 0 and RAID 1 are amongst the high-lights of the new platform. Integrated network capabilities have been around for some time in VIA's South Bridges, as has sound but the latest Vinyl Audio has made some splash all over the web. Unfortunately, Vinyl Audio requires VIA's own AC'97 VT1616 audio CODEC and ASUS is going with the Analog Devices AD1980 CODEC, meaning, we'll have to skip Vinyl Audio for now.

In all the hype about dual channel memory, a single channel design appears almost antique but until 6 months ago everybody had to live with it and the bars of performance have not been raised that much since. Can the KT600 keep up with its competitors and what else did ASUS do to make the A7V600 a success? You are about to find out.

Aside from adding a whole new meaning to the acronym DDR (Don't Do Rambus), one of Eric Chang's, then VP of Sales at VIA-USA, best known statement is that all it takes is one good chipset to gain an instant 35-40% market share. In the past, we have seen exactly this happening with the KT 266A and the KT333, to be repeated by nVidia's nForce2 chipset or, in the P4 arena with the Blitzkrieg success of the SIS 645 series. Success in the IC business is, however, a very volatile entity. Today's market leaders can easily become tomorrow's victims of any market downturn and Darwinism as well as the potential for Darwin Awards remain the dominant forces in the industry.

VIA Apollo KT600 block diagram featuring the "ideal" or "preferred" configuration of the chipset including the VT1616 AC'97 audio CODEC and VIA's own VT6103 network controller.

Darwin awards aside, after losing market share to nVidia, VIA has been under pressure to follow up on the success stories of the earlier KT series, especially since the P4X chipset line had a few "15 minutes of fame" but no lingering presence in the mainboard menagerie. The KT400 and 400A chipsets were not able to live up to the numbering scheme where the numerical moniker would indicate the default bus and memory speed. Most boards based on the KT400 and 400A chipsets tended to exhibit stability problems with either the processor bus or the memory interface or both at 400 MHz, if they were even able to reach it.

There are only so many "A"s that can be added to the official name of the chipset, and the chance of correcting everything with the first "A" was missed. "B" sounds like B-rated and is, therefore, out of the question. The brave way out of this dilemma was to instigate a new nomenclature, according to which the 400 MHz bus interface needed the suffix -600. FastStream64 memory architecture with its expanded array of prefetch buffers to reduce access latencies was already implemented with the 400A chipset revision.

There are a few other, holistic changes that adapt to the latest trends in e.g. storage technology. The latest revision of the VIA VT 8237 South Bridge features integrated "native" SATA support as well as the 8X Vlink connection between North and South Bridge introduced already with the KT400. In addition, the latest revision of the VT8237 supports eight USB 2.0 ports rather than six in the earlier revision. One additional interesting aspect is the possibility of expanding the existing two SATA channels by adding two extra phy layers to the mainboard and increasing the total number of SATA devices supported to four. Keep in mind here that SATA performance benefits heavily rely upon the point-to-point connectivity without interrupts of each device, and, thus, interposing any extra multipliers / arbitrators can potentially negate the advantages of SATA.

Last not least, the fact that the AGP / PCI bus frequencies are still spawned off the external CPU bus masterclock by means of a divider appears all of a sudden somewhat anachronistic. To be sure, only 6 months ago, nobody would have even suggested otherwise but the PC industry is, downturn or not, very fast-paced still.

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