Do You Think VIA's AMD DDR Board Will Be Much Better Then AM760???

[Playmaker]

Do you all think VIA's AMD DDR board will be better then the current DDR solution of the AMD760? What is VIA's called? KT266? When do you think it will be out? I am trying to decide whether to go with a KT133A and 256mb of PC133 or get the VIA board and get 256mb of DDR RAM for the extra $200 or so. I am waiting for the Kyro2 to come out so I probably won't start buying parts until April, and the VIA board should be out by then. I want this comp to last for awhile, 2 years if I'm lucky. Think the DDR board will be much faster for games then the KT133A? I know the AMD760 isn't, but I'm asking this wondering about the VIA board since it's supposed to be better.

 

[Modus]

Nope. It will be cheaper, but not much faster, if at all.

Modus

 

[Modus]

Oh, and never buy any computer hardware with a view to it "lasting" any amount of time whatsoever. Trying to outlast this industry's planned obsolescence is futile and self-defeating. Simply buy according to the dictates of value:

1) Establish your needs.

2) Find the product that meets or exceeds those needs while providing the highest price/performance ratio.

Longevity is simply a factor of performance degrading over time in relation to newer products. Nothing makes a 1.1 GHz Athlon last longer than a 1.0 GHz Athlon, other than the fact that it's 10% faster. Ultimate value is achieved when you can reduce every variable to a number, plug it into a price/performance equation, and come out with an undisputable answer.

Modus

 

[jaydee]

Get the KT133A, and buy your RAM now, before prices skyrocket. DDR ram has shown its only capable of 5-7% increase in performance with the Athlon core. The Athlon core, is much more reliant upon a high FSB, than RAM is, therefore performance increase is minimal until a new core is released. Via's chipset is so mature now anyway, I wouldn't look for a new chipset from them, unless it had significant better perfomance. See Asus, MSI, Abit, and Iwill mobo's as they are very, very mature, and stable. Good luck

 

[Anavrin]

...and you forgot to mention that you also must establish a minimal bottleneck. Those are ugly.

 

[Soccerman]

it all depends on what you define as better..

if you mean performance, then going by Via's track record, the AMD solution will be the better performer.

going by reliability, we've had alot more experience with the Via chipsets, and we know AMD's chipsets are somewhat tricky sometimes with generic components, in this case, Via wins IMHO. though there are some odd problems I've heard about with soundcards on Via chipsets..

the difference between the Via KT133 and AMD's 750 was that the 750 wasn't socket. that pretty much kept it from competing (AMD says they don't want to be the chipset maker). With the 760, I don't know what's going to happen to make it obsolete. it can't be the southbridge, becuase the 760 is pin compatible with every Via southbridge today (probably tommorow, at least for the short term).

what could it be? will Via somehow impliment an Asynchronous memory clock? I doubt it. AGP 8x? nope, I don't think so.. real support for AMD CPU's running with a 166mhz-200mhz fsb? doubt it, but hey, that's the only thing I can think of! it sure would be a killer chipset if that happened.. the problem is, considering Via's track record again on performance, it TAKES an extra 33mhz to beat the competing AMD chipset.. or at least, it did when it came to the 750 and KX133. no accurate benches can be made when considering the 750 compared to the KT133, unless you have a very rare Slot-A T-Bird.

 

[Zipperhead]

jaydee-there is more than just a 5-7% increase.look at these benchmarks!Scores using sandra 2001

CPU Multimedia:

Integer 8517
Floating Point 10382

CPU Bench:

ALU 4273
FPU 2078

Memory:

ALU 727
FPU 945


My system:

inwin q500 full tower case
asus a7m266 with multiplier mod
athlon t-bird 1.2gig@1520
crucial pc2100 ddr-256meg
seagate ultra 160 15,000rpm 18gig h.d.
adaptec 29160 contoller
plextor ultraplexwide 40x cd-rom drive
plextor plexwriter 12/4/32 burner
creative labs 64meg geforce2 ultra video card
santa cruz sound card
3com 905b nic
sony e400 19" flat screen monitor

 

[Modus]

Zipperhead,

Obviously memory performance is going to increase more than 5-7%. But Jaydee's point was that the real world performance delta between an Athlon system with a 133 MHz FSB and 133 MHz memory and an Athlon system with a 133 MHz FSB and 266 MHz memory is not that great. Tom's Hardware provides the latest benchmarks, and AMD 760 systems end up around 10% faster than KT133A systems on most tests.

Soccerman,

A few clarifications:

- The AMD 750 does indeed support Socket A. Just not PC133 memory.

- VIA chipsets improve their performance as they mature. Take a standard KT133 board runing PC100 memory and compare it to a Socket-A AMD 750 board (they do exist, Gigabyte makes one), and you'll find the performance virtually identical. VIA is taking a more or less unified driver approach, which also helps. The KT266 will undoubtedly be very close to the AMD 760 in performance when it is finally released.

Modus

 

[Anavrin]

> With the 760, I don't know what's going to happen to make it obsolete. it can't be the southbridge, becuase the 760 is pin compatible with every Via southbridge today (probably tommorow, at least for the short term).

The KT266 will be using a totally different North/Southbridge connection. The V-Link will offer dedicated bandwidth between CPU and memory (and AGP?), while still keeping the PCI bus as is in any other Athlon system. Therefore it's not pin compatible with anything else that's currently available right now. Via's track record has, admittedly, been horrible.

The only reason their chipset for the P3 worked properly was because Intel made the mistake of using RDRAM to promote their coppermines. Via's motherboards stink in memory performance. But even a crappy motherboard with low latency SDRAM is better than i820/840s with high latency RDRAM.

However, with the KT133, they impressed everyone by showing that they've finally mastered memory bandwidth and latency in chipsets. If they improve on that and the V-Link is as promising in real life as it is on paper, then the KT266 *will* beat the AMD760 with a fast enough processor by a large margin.

 

[Modus]

Anarvin,

Don't put too much hope in the V-Link. It's more of a future-proofing feature than anything else. Thanks to AGP, the PCI bus doesn't get saturated very often these days.

Modus

 

[Anavrin]

Well, V-Link certainly is quite competent. Look at P3 Via DDR chipsets (btw, the KT266 is just a P3 Apollo Pro DDR chipset fitted for AMD CPUs). Ie: Tom's Hardware's Apollo Pro 266 review

Via's chipset can compete against the i815. That's quite a feat to be able to surpass Intel's own hub structure. As Tom said, it needs a hungrier processor, and the 1.2 Ghz Athlon certainly can benefit from the KT266 if it can benefit from the AMD760, as inefficient a chipset as that is.

 

[Playmaker]

I think I'll just go with the KT133A then since it is already established as reliable and fast, plus prices should be even lower by the time I buy. Thanks for your input.

 

[Rand]

My opinion, the KT266 will be more reliable and stable then the AMD760 and likely cheaper as well. It should also remove the problems allot of AMD760 boards have with running on the 266MHz FSB.

I don't expect it to be any faster though, in fact I expect the AMD760 chipset to outperform the KT266 by 2-3%.
In my mind I don't believe Via has yet proved they can make a high performing chipset, stable-yes. But their memory performance still isnt up to par.

 

[jaydee]

Yeah thanks Modus. No application will take that much advantage of RAM bandwidth to enjoy that considerable lead. That, and a 1.52ghz overclock. Thats insane. Whats the FSB set at? Doesn't the RAM have to be sychronized with it, or the AMD760 doesn't have to? Thats some wicked setup you got there zipperhead.