Gigabyte GA-6RX Apollo Pro266 ATX

Introduction

Lately, in the motherboard market, the spotlight has mostly been on AMD platform products.  Together with the 133MHz FSB Athlon-C processors, AMD released the 760 chipset that uses DDR memory.  We have seen companies like FIC using the new chipset in their products, such as the AD11.  Even more exciting is the VIA KT133A chipset, which allows the use of traditional PC133 SDRAM and officially supports the Athlon-C as well.

On the other hand Intel is garnering less attention since the Pentium III has already past its peak and the Pentium 4 still has yet to offer any tangible performance benefits over the Athlon.  The i815E chipset has been around for more than nine months and Intel has no intention to release any new chipsets supporting the Pentium III.  Even the newer i815EP chipset is nothing more than the i815E without an integrated video core so that the overall cost of the boards could be lower.

VIA took this opportunity and released the Apollo Pro266 chipset, the world's first Pentium III chipset with support for DDR SDRAM.  Previously VIA took advantage of Intel’s failure with the i820 chipset and released the Apollo Pro133A, which filled the gap between what the market asked for and what the 440BX chipset couldn’t provide, such as AGP 4X and 133MHz/PC133 support.  This time around VIA again tried to use the Apollo Pro266 to provide the market with what the i815E lacks, using DDR technology to provide more memory bandwidth as well as a larger memory capacity (the i815 still only supports 512MB of PC133 SDRAM).

It has been a while since we last touched a Gigabyte motherboard, but we have always had decent experiences with their products.  This time around they brought us their VIA Apollo Pro266 solution, the GA-6RX.  Being the first Apollo Pro266 board entering the AnandTech Labs, how are they going to try set the “standard” for other contenders?