VIA KT266 Socket-A DDR Chipset: Third time's a charm?

Now that we're in the realm of the real world we can see how the KT266 really stands up to the competition.  So far we're expecting it to be slower than the AMD 760 but not by too much, although noticeably faster than the MAGiK1, especially at the 100MHz FSB settings.

For whatever reason, the MAGiK1 seems to perform quite well in the SYSMark suite; the KT266 is not enough to dethrone it as it comes in directly under the AMD 760 in terms of performance.

The standings are what we would expect, pay close attention to the 100MHz FSB performance of the KT266 compared to the MAGiK1.

As a more torturous performance test, we turn to Benchmark Studio Beta 2.0 with a total of 13 stress modules running in the background.  This test can truly bring a system to its knees and it really does help in making the performance differences between the various platforms more pronounced.

Here the KT266 does fairly respectably, although it cannot topple the AMD 760 it does come relatively close although the KT133A was starting to get quite close as well.