VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

The end Result

After modifying the board, the performance levels increased considerably using the 1.0B9 BIOS, even higher than the leaked 1.0B10 BIOS.  Unfortunately all isn't pretty in BIOS land, as both of the new BIOSes considerably reduced the stability of the board.

For starters, the board would not always post with our Duron 800.  The biggest problem we had with this one was the board wouldn't post after a reboot, often requiring a BIOS reset before POSTing again.  While we would normally attribute this to a flaky CPU, the same problem occurred with our test 1.0GHz Athlon as well although not as frequently.  There are currently some theories as to why some boards do this, we are still looking into that as well.

Using the same aggressive memory timings on the modified K7T266 Pro with the 1.0B9 and 1.0B10 BIOSes would result in severe instability and corruption of test files during benchmarking.  We had to back down to CAS 2.5 (although CAS 2 worked on all of the other boards we tested, including the unmodified K7T266 Pro). 

Even at CAS 2.5, SYSMark runs rarely completed without rerunning one or two of the tests (it was much worse with the 1.0B9 BIOS).  The same held true for Benchmark Studio performance tests.  The SPECviewperf issues were still present, meaning the board would hang under the test and attempting to kill the processes would always result in a hard lock. 

The situation was the same under Windows 98; frequent hard locks in games occurred, definitely much worse than the original setup.

Without a doubt, stability was sacrificed.  There was a reason that MSI shipped their retail boards with the 1.0 BIOS revision, but you all aren't here to read about how stable the 1.0 BIOS revision was, you are here to find out if the combination of this modified board and a new beta BIOS restored faith in the KT266 chipset.  And we are about to tell you just that.