Bingo! Synchronous Operation With 166 MHz FSB, Continued

Because the two buses (FSB and memory) ran asynchronously, even DDR333 memory with CL2.0 could not achieve optimal performance. Now, eight months after the introduction of the VIA KT333, it is finally possible to clock the CPU and RAM synchronously and attain maximum system performance.

The next step in the evolution has already been determined: boards for DDR 400 (KT400) that work with 200 MHz memory clock can only communicate asynchronously with the newest Athlon XP processors. So, a further increase in FSB clock speed is planned.

The reference board from Nvidia with the nForce 2 chipset. During the test, it did not run error-free.

Northbridge of the nForce 2 chipset.

Southbridge of the nForce 2 chipset.

Ultimately, there's still some distance between the Athlon XP and its arch rival, the Intel Pentium 4: the latter offers a bandwidth of 4.2 GB/s at an FSB clock of 133 MHz - together with RDRAM PC1066 (533 MHz), synchronous operation is possible (4.2 GB/s).