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

Memory Bandwidth - Cachemem

Cachemem is the exact opposite when it comes to synthetic memory performance tests in that the benchmark measures the peak read and write bandwidth figures without heavy data manipulation. 

Here we see that the peak performance of the KT266 running at 1000/133 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM is very close to that of the AMD 760 and the ALi MAGiK1.  It is also interesting to note that running the KT266 at 1000/133 with PC1600 DDR SDRAM vs. 1000/100 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM produces nearly identical bandwidth numbers.  Depending on whether or not the two configurations have close enough latencies, those two setups may actually yield similar real-world performance as well.

Judging by the fact that the KT266 at 1000/100 with PC1600 DDR SDRAM offers noticeably more bandwidth than the MAGiK1 in the same situation we can immediately assume, before looking at the actual tests, that the KT266 does not suffer from the same extreme latency issues as the MAGiK1 with the 100MHz FSB.

As we pointed out the first time we looked at this benchmark, memory write performance is significantly degraded in comparison to read performance because in this case there is actual manipulation of memory (think about it, you can read much faster than you can write). 

The KT266 does fairly well in this benchmark, although the bandwidth it offers isn't nearly as great as the AMD 760 it doesn't suffer nearly as bad as the MAGiK1, which has trouble differentiating itself from the year-old KT133.