Is there any point to the VIA KT333 and SiS 745?

[Daovonnaex]

Frankly, I can't see any real point. The Alpha EV6 front side bus of the athlon, at the current speed (133MHz double-pumped, or 266 MHz), cannot use more that 2.1 gigabytes per second of bandwidth, equivalent to that provided by PC2100 DDR SDRAM (or approximately). Therefore, PC2700 DDR SDRAM would yield no appreciable performance gain. What then, is the purpose of releasing chipsets for the Athlon/Duron that support PC2700 DDR SDRAM?

 

[Migroo]

While there may not be a 'point' in terms of speed or performance, there is this point.

By releasing another chipset, AMD and its chipset buddies etc will keep their punters excited due to the product release. Many people in the AMD market are enthusiasts, and they thrive on the latest products. I feel that AMD and VIA are trying to keep the consumer focussed on their products, particularly as they want to lose as few customers as possible to Intel's new 'must-have' item - the Northwood and are trying to bridge the gap until the next AMD release.

Oh, and if the motherboards suport a higher FSB aswell as the RAM (not sure about this - I think they support up to 166 (dual pumped) as opposed to 133) then if you overclock an XP processor up from 133 to, say 166 FSB and you have included PC2700 RAM, then the only overclocked item in your machine would be the CPU. It is commonplace for an overclock to be limited by something other than the CPU, so they are taking away this limit.

This is a product that is highly attractive to overclockers, and to the same extent, to the people who just have to have the latest thing...

 

[AGodspeed]

To tell you the truth, I don't see much of a point either. The only new thing being brought to the table with KT333 and SiS745 is DDR333 support, and since there's no real/official JEDEC approved DDR333 RAM out on the market right now, why even waste your time. Sure, if you wanna have a little fun fiddling around with the latest and "greatest" chipset, then go right ahead. But besides DDR333, there's nothing exciting about these chipsets.

Maybe T-bred will do something for the Socket A chipset market, but I don't see exactly what it could do. As you mentioned, the EV6 bus at 133MHz won't benefit much from DDR333, DDR266 is its peak.

Until AMD moves to it's new NUMA bus architecture with the introduction of ClawHammer, I don't see much more improvement for AMD chipsets anytime in the future. Although, there might still be room for improvement in Socket A chipset memory controllers, but I doubt that as well.

 

[formulav8]

The KT333 did show alittle more performance at 266mhz then the KT266a did at 266mhz. Not worth the money to buy it though. If they don't have 333mhz fsb support then its not worth it at all as the Athlon can't really use more then 2100ddr at 266mhz. Its more hype then anything if it just runs the memory 333 and not the bus.


Jason

 

[Athlon4all]

From a performance perspective, there is no point to KT333(A) and SiS 745. Really, the big thing (for me at least) in this chipsets is the new technologies that will be in the SB (ie Firewire, USB2, ATA/133) but even those features aren't huge. I agree though with Migroo about how AMD and VIA need to release a new product .

 

[Gstanfor]

What would be nice for users, but probably won't happen with either the SiS or VIA chipsets is that the spare bandwidth could be used to improve thing like AGP accesses, PCI / IDE memory accesses, much like the nforce does. This sort of thing really helps to "smooth out" the performance of a computer system.

Greg

 

[WetWilly]

What would be nice for users, but probably won't happen with either the SiS or VIA chipsets is that the spare bandwidth could be used to improve thing like AGP accesses, PCI / IDE memory accesses, much like the nforce does

Both SiS and VIA are already doing this. On some SiS boards you can select whether the USB and/or IDE controllers use MuTIOL or PCI. As for VIA, their southbridge controllers already use V-Link. That's why the onboard IDE on the V-Link southbridges don't suffer from VIA's PCI latency issues.

 

[jpprod]

Of course there is a point to these chipsets - potentially much higher overclocked FSB speeds, with PCI/AGP running on spec

 

[JellyBaby]

Not sure about SiS but I'd imagine Via's 333 would include some bug fixes over 266A. At least one could hope. But there really isn't much point to these boards.

 

[MadRat]

I'll wait for the KT400 when the T-bred hits.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< I'll wait for the KT400 when the T-bred hits. >>

You cannot purchase PC3200 DDR SDRAM.