Boost For DDR Technology: The AMD-760 Chipset, Continued
All of the three boards tested use the AMD 761 Northbridge. The building block offers not only DDR SDRAM support but also a front-side-bus with 133 MHz for the new Athlon CPUs.
The Southbridge VT82C686B, however, comes from VIA. It supports functions such as Ultra-DMA/100 and USB 4x.
In principle, the advantages of the new AMD-760 chipset can be explained very quickly: Compared to the predecessor 750 (Irongate), the newcomer offers DDR SDRAM support and 133 MHz front-side-bus. Not long ago, VIA closed the gap by introducing the KT133A chipset. The already rather successful KT133 building block was expanded with 133 MHz FSB (officially) - hence the name KT133A. The advantage left in using the AMD-760 is the DDR SDRAM support, but the VIA KT266 will support even this function in only a few weeks from now. To get an all-around picture of the qualities of the AMD-760, we have put the first three boards equipped with this chipset through extensive testing. It remains to be seen whether the VIA with its KT266 can keep up with the AMD-760 - especially in terms of performance.
The Asus A7M266 and the Biostar M7MIA are equipped with an AGP Pro slot. However, low-cost graphics cards which use this expanded functionality are not yet available.