VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

Final Words

The AMD 760 continues to be a lower latency chipset than any other Socket-A platform currently available.  We have attributed this in the past to potentially a SuperBypass-like feature in the 761 North Bridge that is able to reduce latencies dramatically when a number of transactions are taking place.  However, the KT266 has the potential to be quite a contender in this aspect if we use the performance improvements our modification/updates yielded.  With MSI and Gigabyte both seemingly reworking boards to offer greater performance, it seems like this will become a reality for the KT266.

On the bandwidth side of things, the KT266 also has the potential to offer more bandwidth than the AMD 760 and the ALi MAGiK1 (although the latter suffers incredibly at 100MHz FSB frequencies) again, judging by the improvements we've seen here.  The KT266 is apparently able to read from memory quite quickly, possibly due to its noticeably deep buffers.  The write performance is still not capable of matching that of the AMD 760 however the combination of higher overall memory bandwidth and competitively low latency memory access will easily nullify that point in any real world applications.

We have also proved that the real world performance of the KT266 has the potential to grow much greater than that of the AMD 760.  The original results we came upon failed to paint this positive of a picture, but with a bit of soldering and a new BIOS, things have changed dramatically.

This brings us to the issue of what to do today.  If anything, you should still stay away from the KT266, the platform is simply not mature enough.  Even if you are brave enough to try removing and soldering resistors, you should never settle for a system that is sub par in terms of stability.  What good is performance if you have to reboot your system all the time?

Without a doubt, the KT266 platforms will improve, but it may take a little while.  Remember how long it took for the Apollo Pro 133A motherboards to finally mature?  Hopefully it won't take that long for KT266 boards, but we still cannot recommend that you purchase any of the currently available KT266 boards.  Not until we can see some more mature stability and performance figures without having to use beta BIOSes and solder resistors. 

On a more specific level, what is MSI going to do about all of the users that don't have the "right board" when it comes to their K7T266 Pros?  We will be in touch with them this week, hopefully they won't just hand everyone a soldering iron and some instructions ;)