ATA/66 Vs. ATA/100 - Errors In The New VIA-Southbridge?
In the last motherboard article , we observed a strange effect. The boards we presented in this article with the new ATA/100-Southbridge admittedly performed very well during hard disk-intensive applications in the office field (Sysmark results), but the new Southbridge seems to have a negative effect on the Northbridge of the KT133 chip set. The Northbridge controls the AGP bus for the graphic card as well as the data exchange between CPU and memory. Therefore, the results of the 3D games and the OpenGL tests can only be described as uniformly bad.
This correlation is evident particularly in the case of MSI. The manufacturer offers two versions of the MSI K7T Pro2. The classic K7T Pro2 has the ATA/66-Southbridge (VT82C686A ), while the K7T Pro2-A is based on the ATA/100-Southbridge (VT82C686B ). Apart from this difference, the boards are constructed identically. The result shown above reveals that the VT82C686B appears to slow down the Northbridge. A different graphics driver version from NVIDIA does not change this trend, either.
