VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

Memory Bandwidth - Cachemem

While Cachemem doesn't provide a real world indication of bandwidth usage (Sandra doesn't offer the most real world example either, but it's better than Cachemem) we can begin to see where some of the K7T266 Pro's performance gains under Sandra are coming from. 

With both of the new BIOSes, the read performance is improved considerably by almost 15% over the original, unmodified board.  This puts them both at levels even higher than the AMD 760/ALi MAGiK1 (by about 8%). 

Interestingly enough, the same cannot be said about the write performance of the board using the new BIOSes.  The performance actually decreases by 9% with the B9 BIOS and 27% with the B10 BIOS.

This may be an architecture limitation of the KT266, because of its design it may not be able to offer much higher write performance levels although it is already in second place behind the AMD 760.