VIA Apollo KT266 Revisited - Much Ado About Nothing

Test Setup - Updated

We obviously used the same setup as in the initial article and simply added the new results to the benchmark scores we had tested initially. Our platform was still MSI's K7T266 Pro motherboard, the BIOS used was "a6380vsp.10a". Our board was from the very start equipped with the mysterious 1kΩ R126 resistor and not with the 'R127' resistor.

There had also been discussions in our forum about the fact that I had used different memory in the AMD760 and KT266 motherboards last week. Let me first commend those readers for their vigilance. Of course this is an unusual situation. However, there is a very good explanation for it. The AMD760 motherboard MSI K7 Master-S runs best with the Micron PC2100 DDR-memory, while this memory does not provide the best results in MSI's KT266 motherboard K7T266 Pro. I tried to be as fair as possible to both and therefore used with each board the memory that makes it perform best. I am not able to give you an explanation for the strange behavior. Theoretically, the Infineon DDR-memory has the fastest specs and should therefore run best in both motherboards, but the K7 Master-S with its rather old BIOS seems to prefer the older Micron memory for the time being. I hope that MSI will finally provide a BIOS-upgrade for this board, because it might well be that it could make AMD760 look even better.

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SystemVIA Apollo KT266AMD 760VIA Apollo KT133A
ProcessorAthlon 'C' 1.33 GHz, overclocked to 1.466 GHz
MotherboardMSI MS-6380"K7T266 Pro", rev. 1.0Pre-Release BIOSMSI MS-6341"K7 Master-S", rev. 0DPre-Release BIOSAsus A7V133, rev. 1.01BIOS 1004
Memory256 MB Infineon PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting CL 2, 4-way Interleave256 MB Micron/Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Setting 8-8-5-2-2-2-2256 MB Micron/Crucial PC133 SDRAM, CL2, Setting 2-2-2
Graphics CardNVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra Reference Card, 64 MB, Driver 6.67 (Win98/Win2k)
Hard DriveIBM DTLA-307075, 75 GB, 7200 RPM, ATA100, FAT32 Win98, NTFS Win2k
DirectX8.0a
Desktop Resolution for BAPCo's Sysmark 2000 and Webmark20011024x768x16x85
Quake 3 ArenaRetail Versionno sound
Unreal TournamentVersion 4.28 (patched)no sound
EvolvaRolling Demo v1.2 Build 944Standard command line = -benchmarkBump Mapped command line = -benchmark -dotbump
3D Mark 2000Build 335, Default Benchmark
SiSoft Sandra StandardVersion 2001
Desktop Resolution for SPECviewperf 6.1.21280x1024x32x85
FlasK SettingsVideo 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