Expectations
VIA's Apollo KT266 represented by MSI's K7T266 Pro will have to stick up against AMD's 760 (MSI K7Master-S) and VIA's own Apollo KT133A in form of Asus' A7V133. What we would like to see is that VIA's new chipset is clearly able to beat its older sibling KT133A and that it is able to at least reach the performance of AMD's 760 chipset.
There is enough criticism of DDR-memory already, because even AMD's 760 chipset is not able to provide the expected major performance boost over SDR-SDRAM solutions such as Apollo KT133A. VIA's own Athlon-DDR solution cannot really afford to be slower than AMD's chipset, because the least a user deserves to gain from DDR-memory is the 5-10% performance increase provided by AMD760.
ALi's MaGiK1 chipset has already been the first DDR-flop, which justifies its continued existence only with the marketing-effect of the magic term 'DDR', but certainly not with any respectable performance. We don't want to see another flop, especially not produced by one of the biggest supporters of 'TeamDDR'.
Benchmark Setup
| System | VIA Apollo KT266 | AMD 760 | VIA Apollo KT133A |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Athlon 'C' 1.33 GHz, overclocked to 1.466 GHz | ||
| Motherboard | MSI MS-6380"K7T266 Pro", rev. 1.0Pre-Release BIOS | MSI MS-6341"K7 Master-S", rev. 0DPre-Release BIOS | Asus A7V133, rev. 1.01BIOS 1004 |
| Memory | 256 MB Infineon PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting CL 2, 4-way Interleave | 256 MB Micron/Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting 8-8-5-2-2-2-2 | 256 MB Micron/Crucial PC133 SDRAM, CL2, Setting 2-2-2 |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra Reference Card, 64 MB, Driver 6.67 (Win98/Win2k) | ||
| Hard Drive | IBM DTLA-307075, 75 GB, 7200 RPM, ATA100, FAT32 Win98, NTFS Win2k | ||
| DirectX | 8.0a | ||
| Desktop Resolution for BAPCo's Sysmark 2000 and Webmark2001 | 1024x768x16x85 | ||
| Quake 3 Arena | Retail Versionno sound | ||
| Unreal Tournament | Version 4.28 (patched)no sound | ||
| Evolva | Rolling Demo v1.2 Build 944Standard command line = -benchmarkBump Mapped command line = -benchmark -dotbump | ||
| 3D Mark 2000 | Build 335, Default Benchmark | ||
| SiSoft Sandra Standard | Version 2001 | ||
| Desktop Resolution for SPECviewperf 6.1.2 | 1280x1024x32x85 | ||
| FlasK Settings | Video Codec: DivX 3.11 alpha, Fast-Motion, keyframe every 10 seconds, compression 100, data rate 910 kbpsAudio Codec: audio not processedVideo Resolution: 720x480, 29.97 fps, interlacedResizing: Nearest Neighbor |
