kt600 based motherboards

[Aenslead]

Possibly they are just trying to get the most out of their existing product line.

Socket A will be a dead plataform in less than a year, and I highly doubt that any new chipset will be produced, since there are no more FSB bumps nor new memory specs other than the introduction of DDR2 in sight.

Lets not forget also that nVidia knows VIA's territory, and is the reason why I beleive that they will try to push the IGP version of their nForce 2 line further, to tackle VIA's KM266A, which as far as I am concerned, does not support DDR400 nor 400FSB, wich is a big plus... we can already see their success with big OEMs. SONY and HP/Q are only using nForce chipsets for their AMD systems... lest be talked about Alienware and Falcon-NW.

UPDATE: perhaps no new northbridge will be released, but as seen in the Inquirer, nVidia is planning on upgrading their southbridge, wich will support native SATA, RAID and Gigabit LAN... wich, once more, would aim straight at VIA's newest option.

 

[Boonesmi]

from what ive read the last couple weeks it seems like nvidias new southbridge has been delayed again, and not expected to start sampling till october, so probably wont be avaialble till about the beginning of next year

and via has newer integrated chipsets then the km266

km400 based boards are already available and the km400a shouldnt be far away (km400 supports ddr 400 and 333mhz fsb... km400a supports 400mhz fsb and memory)
plus they use the new onboard unichrome video (its not designed for 3d gaming, but its supposed to be awsome for stuff like dvd and video encoding/decoding)

 

[Aenslead]

True about the delay. Q4 is when the new nVidia southbridge is due...

I've not seen any KM400 boards on the wild yet.... have you? Besides, what possible advantages might it bring against a more-3d capable nVidia solution?

 

[tcsenter]

well, those lazy boys at Gigabyte simply grabbed the previous design and poured it into the KT600 one...ASUS goes for the same...

To the uninformed eye, perhaps. But I see dozens of differences between them. When you have a solid reference design, you don't try to reinvent the wheel.

Auto manufacturers are still putting engines in the front, trunks in the back, roofs on the top and wheels on the bottom. Those lazy auto engineers!

 

[Boonesmi]

newegg has the several km400 based boards... i know a couple guys who have built systems using the Asus A7V8X-MX (km400) both said the board worked great


and comparing it to the nforce2... the nforce2 is by far the better choice for gamers,

but if you plan on using it for a home entertainment box, then the km400 is the better choice by far (since it has hardware based mpeg2, tv out, and superior 2D)
also they can come with the new VT8237 southbridge with built in sata and via vinly audio (which is higher quality then the best nforce2 solutions) again making it a great choice for most any system that wont be primarily a gaming systems

plus it has an 8x agp slot just incase the need comes up for some high end 3D


the one down side is that most of the first gen of boards ive seen based on the km400 are using the older southbridge but that is supposed to change pretty quick

 

[Aenslead]

tcsenter: well, is it or is it NOT the same design? Quite obviously you need to move some mosfets here, some resistors there, but the PCB is quite the same. Sheesh!

Boonesmi: I figure that by the time they start getting that new southbridge, nVidia will be offering their MCP-S/1000 on every nForce chip.

Don't get me wrong, but I beleive it will be a short lived chipset... just because mayor OEMs only use nVidia, like I said earlier... have you seen any reviews on the net? Also, I've only heard Vinyl is 'good', but never compared to solutions like CREATIVE's, which Sound Storm IS compared to...

 

[Boonesmi]

im not real big into high quality audio... and im far from an expert on it, hehe

but from what i understand the via vinyl is part of the envy24 line of chips (used in lots of professional audio devices) and from the reviews ive read it is supposed to be superior to any of the audigy cards, or nvidia's Sound Storm.

 

[Boonesmi]

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q2/maudio-rev/index.x?pg=1

one of many reviews that show high good the envy24 line is... the problem is the cost, most of the cards using it are quite hardcore and way out of the average pc users budget

 

[tcsenter]

tcsenter: well, is it or is it NOT the same design? Quite obviously you need to move some mosfets here, some resistors there, but the PCB is quite the same. Sheesh!

What changes would you suggest the engineers make in the reference KT400 - KT600 PCB design? Since VIA makes these chipsets to literally be drop-in replacements of previous iterations within the same chipset family, why would you expect to see anything other than very similar PCB designs and layouts?

 

[Boonesmi]

i just saw a roundup of kt600 based boards link

i didnt really have time to read much of it, but looking though the graphs it was amazing how all the boards in all the benchmarks pretty much performed about identical

 

[Aenslead]

That's happened since the KT400: every motherboard (normally except BIOSTAR and ECS) perform just about the same... same goes with nForce 2 motherboards. All perfrom 1% +/- from each other.

Edit: also... If I remember correctly in some other post... you mentioned that V-Link had been upgraded...

Well, the link to the roundup you posted mentions this:

"The same 8X V-Link (533MB/s) controller connects the North and Southbridge and the VIA MAC 10/100 Ethernet controller also still exists. "

 

[Boonesmi]

this thread is getting pretty old
but i figured i could do another update to the original thread with some addition info (like adding teh biostar M7VIT Grand)

and sorry Aenslead i didnt see that you had edited your last post to ask about the vlink.... the kt333 used 4x vlink with 266mb/s and the kt400 and newer use the 8x vlink

 

[boyRacer]

Well... after fiddling around with the BIOS and SATA... i'm happy with my KT600...

 

[Remedy]

Revising this thread. Any Aopen KT600 users besides me?

 

[Boonesmi]

Originally posted by: ReMeDy{WcS}
Revising this thread. Any Aopen KT600 users besides me?

what audio codec does your motherboard use?

ive build a couple systems using the a7v600 and the soltek SL-KT600-RL and the msi kt6 delta lsr (all kt600 based boards) and all have been extreemly trouble free


but ive not used the aopen board yet

 

[SilverTrine]

Aopen Kt400 board user here, great board, most stable board I've ever owned, including old BX boards. Great 3 year Aopen warranty. The BIOS based fan speed regulator is a very useful feature too my high speed Panaflo is too noisy at 100% speed, but throttled back to 80% its near silent and cools well.

So I imagine the Kt600 is only better than my Kt400.

 

[Boonesmi]

its been awhile since i actually updated the original post, but i noticed newegg has an ECS kt600 boards (the KT600-A) so ill add it to the list

and actually the board looks kinda nice (even though im not a big ecs fan ) but its only $67 shipped and it looks to have most of the goodies, including Serial ATA.

 

[Boonesmi]

dang ECS has supprised me!!!

after that last post i was looking it up and the ecs web page and came across another ecs kt600 board, the ecs AF1 Deluxe
im suprised ecs has released a board with all those features

a partial list of features on the ECS AF1 Deluxe:
Serial ATA (4 ports!!!)
Gigabit LAN (3com)
onboard firewire
3 IDE channels (6 ide devices)