KM266 Review?

RDMustang1

Diamond Member
Feb 7, 2001
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Has anyone done or seen a review of the KM266 chipset? I know it's based on the KT266a chipset but how does it compare? Did they mess anything up or is it an improvement?

 

ssanches

Senior member
Feb 7, 2002
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I haven't seen any review on the net as yet. Only VIA had released their datasheet and some information comparing the KM133A with the KM266. The KM266 is essentially the KT266a + ProSavage8 (doh, that's what VIA calls it). The graphics core nearly same as the older prosavage except that it can transfer @AGP8X (internally). The beauty of the KM266 is that using SMA on such a board won't hurt performance greatly, due to the KT266A's good performance. I'd "guess" a 5-7% hit on memory, when running 1024*768*16. That would put a KM266 board slightly ahead of an AMD760 board in memory performance, even when using SMA. I doubt there's any change in graphics core, except that the Prosavage benefits from the additional DDR bandwidth. VIA says 3D games performance improve by about 30% vis-a vis the KM133A. Overall it's an excellent value solution.

Currently I know only about the Gigabyte 7VKML board that uses it. I've heard at AMDMB forums that the board is excellent and offers decent performance...Integrated graphics, audio, LAN, ATA133 etc.
 

N8

Member
Oct 3, 2001
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I've yet to see a review on this chipset either. The Gigabyte is available at newegg...the MSI and EpoX are on their sites, but I have yet to see them for sale. Still, I'd really like to see a review of this...comparing it to the KT266A chipset...to see if it REALLY does perform on par w/ it.