VIA's DDR-Runner For Athlon - The Apollo KT266 Chipset

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