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

Our final gaming benchmark is Serious Sam, and hopefully after this comparison we will transition to using the final version of the game for all benchmarking purposes but these figures should translate over relatively well into real world performance in the game. 

The KT266 performs relatively well under Serious Sam, approximately 5% away from the AMD 760 and less than 4% away from the KT133A; still far from what we would call impressive.  But if you look at it from the perspective of the motherboard manufacturers, at least it is offering better performance than the MAGiK1, regardless of configuration (100 or 133MHz FSB, PC1600/PC2100 DDR).

The newest game out of the bunch also manages to provide the most limitations for the test bed to play with.  For a theoretical comparison of the chipsets you should always look at the benchmarks with the least amount of limitations (e.g. 640x480x16 benchmarks), but if you're trying to find out how much of a performance difference you'll notice in your day to day usage of a system, often the more limited benchmarks are those that are better suited for this task (e.g. 1024x768x32 numbers).

In this case, the performance difference between the AMD 760 and the KT266 is reduced to just over 3% which isn't bad considering this is VIA's first attempt at a Socket-A DDR chipset and it is already noticeably cheaper than the AMD 760.