VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

The Chipsets

VIA originally introduced the P4X266 chipset in August of last year but the true cash cow for VIA would end up being the P4M266. The reasoning is simple; major OEMs want highly integrated solutions and they're willing to order in much larger quantities than end users.

More recently, VIA introduced the P4X266A which boasted an improved memory controller that resulted in small real world performance improvements. The P4X266A North Bridge is pin compatible with the P4X266 North Bridge meaning that all of the boards seen here today can easily be modified by the manufacturer to use the new chip.

For the specs and details about the chipset itself we'll refer you back to our original P4X266 review since we're going to focus on the roundup of the individual motherboards alone in this article.