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

The performance picture is pretty much the same here, although this time around the MAGiK1 isn't able to creep ahead of the KT266 (1000/133-PC2100).  The more mature KT133A platform is able to offer a 4% advantage over its new sibling, in spite of the KT266's memory bandwidth advantage.  This is the latency vs. bandwidth issue that we were alluding to in the Cachemem performance analysis section.

The real world performance of the AMD 760 in comparison to the KT266 is actually relatively large, on the order of 7%.  UnrealTournament doesn't have a tendency to become video card limited at 1024 x 768 x 32, even with a regular GeForce2 GTS it still scales and varies quite well with different CPUs and platforms.  This allows the performance delta to still remain relatively large between the two chipsets with identical configurations.

The KT133A continues to offer its lower latency as a strong selling point over the newcomer KT266, giving it performance just underneath that of the champion AMD 760.