Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

VIA's release of the KT400 chipset for the AMD platform at QuakeCon somewhat started off on the wrong foot. In addition, the name KT400 is really a misnomer in that there is only rather limited support for DDR400. On the surface, this paints a rather odd picture of the new chipset. Under the hood, however, is much more than meets the eye. Dedicated support for 333 MHz FSB, AGP X8 and VLink X8 for a 533 MB/sec interconnect between North and SouthBridge are just the barebones. Hand the potential of the chipset over to ASUS and let them work their magic and you'll get the A7V8X, one of the hottest boards that ever roamed the Socket A platform. What is it that got us going on that board and where are the shortcomings?

Once again, the most successful chipset for the AMD SocketA platform has received a facelift. Despite it dominant role, the VIA KT333 chipset has lately been in the crossfire. Issues were found with the PCI bus and related to that, sagging IDE transfer rates caused by saturation of bandwidth of the VLink Interconnect as well as missing features such as parking the bus to extend the transfer cycles beyond a fixed number of transactions. Other upcoming issues concerned the lack of AGP 8X support that currently is just evolving but nonetheless, if such feature exists, any top of the line NorthBridge has to feature it, regardless of whether it is beneficial or not.

So far, the performance of the KT333 has been adequate but there are changes throughout the entire industry such as the move to serial ATA (debuting sometime in Q4 for mass production), official support for the 333 MHz FSB of AMD processors (the rumors are substantiating) and an entirely new generation of game including DOOM3, Unreal Tournament 2003 just to mention two examples. The latter will utilize texture sizes that are capable of choking any conventional AGP 4X interface, 333 MHz FSB will add more stress to the memory controller and possibly add the DDR 400 or PC3200 interface. Last not least, the move from parallel to serial interfaces on the mass storage front will demand faster interconnects as well since the SATA 150 standard operating at 1.5GHz is only the beginning. As a side-effect, the new platform also allows the justification of a Gigabit Ethernet interface which, under full load would have had a good chance to choke the older bus.

Block diagram of the new chipset. The main improvements are native support for 333MHz FSB CPUs, AGP 8X, DDR 400 (not officially supported) and 533 MB/sec 8x VLink interconnect. In addition, 4 extra interrupt lines are implemented which, however, are hard allocated to integrated peripherals supported by the South Bridge. Note that neither DDR 400 nor the 333 MHz FSB are even listed in the diagram, neither is there any indication that the 333 MHz FSB will only support sychronous memory operation. We'll go beyond the diagram, trust us...

next page:    => At One Glance =>