VIA's KT266A: The Saga Continues

Memory Bandwidth

The KT266A’s claim to fame is an improved DDR memory controller; what better way to verify that than with synthetic memory benchmarks?

We were very impressed when we first saw the 735’s performance scores under Sandra’s STREAM tests.  A 21% advantage over the SiS 735 is exactly what the KT266A is able to achieve, not to mention a 48% increase over the original KT266. 

The INT-STREAM results were no fluke, the standings do not change much at all here.  The KT266A still holds a 20% advantage over the SiS 735.  But then again it’s extremely rare that these results translate into real world performance advantages right?

Cachemem is much more of a theoretical bandwidth test than Sandra since it doesn’t perform as many functions on the data being transferred.  Here we see the true advantages of the KT266A’s memory controller as it is 30% faster than the SiS 735.  This is almost 80% efficiency of the KT266A’s DDR memory controller; it would be surprising to see even NVIDIA’s nForce offer significantly higher results in this particular test.

Again the KT266 holds a 30% lead over its closest competitor which, in this case is the AMD 760.

Finally we have the memory latency results where the KT266A offers a bit of an advantage over the SiS 735 but not much.  This confirms our suspicions that the majority of the performance improvement came at the hands of deeper buffers and optimizations for greater amounts of traffic coming in over the FSB.  Although VIA’s timing improvements are definitely seen by the close to 30% reducing in latency over the KT266, it still does not hold a huge latency advantage over the 735.

It’s obvious that the KT266 will excel in bandwidth intensive situations, not necessarily latency sensitive applications.  With that said, it’s on to the real world…