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

Memory Latency - Cachemem

Here's where things get interesting; the KT266 running at 1000/133 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM (synchronous FSB and memory buses, resulting in lowest overall latency) running at a CAS latency of 2, results in a 239 cycle memory latency.  This is still no match for the extremely low latencies the AMD 760 is capable of attaining, possibly because of SuperBypass optimizations in the chipset that help reduce latency, but it is still better than what the MAGiK1 is able to offer.

The different in latency between the KT266 and the MAGiK1 doesn't really take form until you make the switch to the 100MHz FSB, where the MAGiK1 does seem to have some serious issues.

Also notice that the difference in memory latency between the KT266 running at 1000/100 with PC1600 vs. with PC2100 is only 20 cycles.  Combine that with the minimal gains in memory bandwidth noticed earlier and you would be safe to predict that PC2100 won't give you a tangible performance gain over PC1600 when running at 1000/100 (core/FSB frequency) on the KT266.

The fact that the KT133A is still a lower latency solution than the KT266 could hurt the KT266's chances in terms of present day performance since only a handful of applications/benchmarks are memory bandwidth intensive enough to truly stress bandwidth over latency.