Conclusion and Final Words

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The results that I received in all my tests here matched almost exactly what VIA provided me prior to launch. They felt no need to exaggerate their scores, as their product did all the talking they needed. It’s impossible to not see the KT266A chipset as a winner.

VIA Apollo KT266A Chipset Review - Chipsets 15 What makes this even more exciting, is that the KT266A chipset is a drop in replacement for the KT266 north bridge. This translates into an easy and quick turn around time between when the chipset hits the manufacturers doorstep to when hits yours. Manufacturers do not have to redesign boards for this revision: simply replace the production KT266 with KT266A, update the bios, and *voila!* instant performance boost!

Companies like Sis and Ali, that have pre-planned new chipsets and/or chipset revisions, like the Ali Magik B0 stepping, will definitely have to take notice of these scores and make sure they can beat them before coming out with a lesser product. Doing just that is what hurt the Ali chipset so much before and doing so again would could be a fatal mistake. As AMD doesn’t have any immediate plans for new chipsets, except their continuing work with the AMD-760 MP chipset, KT266A could be the performance leader for quite a while.

Speaking multi-processing, when might we see a third-party chipset enabling use to use Athlon MP processors? VIA didn’t have any specifics at our meeting, but did say that currently, the companies focus is on making sure they have the single processor Athlon and Pentium 4 chipset market tied up before expanding the focus to including more robust chipsets with longer development time and financial overhead. So, it indeed may be a while before the AMD-760 MP chipset has any competition.

VIA also assured me that the KT266A chipset is fully ready to accept the Morgan and Palomino core desktop processors. I was going to test an Athlon MP 1.2 Ghz on the KT266A reference board, but the bios had not enabled the SSE instructions necessary to get the full potential out of the new processor. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait for the first retail board using the KT266A chipset before we test that. (As of Friday, I was still not given information as to who would be first to release a board on this chipset.)

As you can no doubt tell, the VIA KT266A chipset amazed and astounded me! For a chipset that had very little build up and wasn’t very talked about before its launch, it gave a marvelous performance, and will do so in a motherboard near you soon for a minor increase in price. While I can’t give out an Editor’s Choice award to a chipset directly, if a board can be released with this same performance and features we are seeing most everywhere else now, I foresee one in the works! VIA has done fantastic work spicing the KT266A chipset into something every hardcore PC enthusiast will want: the fastest Athlon chipset on the market.

Talk about the KT266A chipset in the News Forum of the AMD Forums.

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