VIA's KT266A: The Saga Continues

IT/Enterprise Computing Performance

It’s unheard of to get any real variation among platforms using the same configuration at the baseline test settings.  The reason being that we’re simply dealing with basic office application performance here; there are no real bandwidth dependencies that cannot be satisfied by PC133 SDRAM and latency should not be a major issue either.  In spite of this, the KT266A maintains a 17% performance advantage over the rest of the DDR SDRAM platforms.  The only possible explanation for this are the internal optimizations in the KT266A North Bridge; it’s a shame VIA didn’t let out more information as we’d be very curious to find out exactly what they did.  For that matter, so would SiS and NVIDIA.

If the KT266A dominated with no load on the system, there’s no doubt that it will continue to do so as we crank up the number of simultaneous tasks.  A 10% lead is what VIA can command over the SiS 735 here.

The picture doesn’t change a bit as the load increases, the KT266A defends its 10% lead.  Only the 4.2GB/s of memory bandwidth that the nForce can offer has a chance of beating VIA here.