|
Conclusion
After the original toad croaks over the VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset, ASUS shows that this chipset has an enormous potential, offering paroli to the fastest i815(E;EP) chipsets. The tested board, even though a very early production sample convinced with outstanding stability and performance. This verdict holds in spite of the fact that there has hardly been any board coming through here that needed that many registry repairs and even a format c: in between. However, and I wish to make this very clear, these errors were caused by setting the FSB to 173 MHz and higher with the memory bus running at the external CPU bus speed, just couldn't get enough of that speed.
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset as the first production example of a heavily modified genre of chipset featuring 266 MB/sec Vlink interconnect between the Host and the Client (formerly known as North and South Bridge) shows that there is no reason to hide between the i815 chipset using a similar (in this case dubbed as Hub) architecture.
Back to the CUV266 itself. There clearly are still a few inconsistencies in the board tested, the two jumpers, one function VIO2 and 3 jumpers are one example, other issues concern the extended initialization phase before the video signal kicks in at boot up but all of these little problems fade away in view of the power, stability and overclockability of the CUV266 which provides a terrific upgrade path for owners of older PIII FCPGA CPUs, running into limitations of their current mainboards. This concerns mostly the die-hard Intel fans, who would otherwise upgrade to a P4. Keep in mind, that the performance of the test system running at a moderate 175 MHz (155 MHz bus speed) is, in most applications equivalent to a 1500 MHz Pentium4. That is, of course, with the exception of any SSE2 optimized application, which, naturally will run faster on a P4.
There is not much else to be said, except, that I haven't had that much fun with a mainboard in quite awhile.
|
