KT333 and KT333A, is there any point???

[meson2000]

I wonder why VIA is thinking about releasing a DDR333 chipset for the athlon processor??
The absolute maximum bandwidth of the FSB is 2.1gb/sec. So why even bother with a 2.7gb/sec
DDR board??? There will be absolutely NO performance difference between a KT266A board
and a KT333A board. The 512meg/sec V-Link of the KT333A chipset will go un-utilized for
about 99% of the average users out there. Just look at the
Nforce boards. The 420 Nforces have 4.2gb/sec memory bandwidth, and they do not
offer any better performance than a KT266A board. AMD is not going to come out with 166mhz
Althons anytime soon. I have yet to see it on any roadmaps. Even the .13micron Athlons have only
a 133mhz FSB on the roadmaps I have seen on the inquirer, amdzone, etc.
So I say again what is the point of this chipset for anyone other than hardcore overclockers???

 

[Athlon4all]

I agree on the mem bandy thing. There is only one thing that could be good for KT333(A) over KT266A and that is the addition of USB 2.0 and ATA/133 in the south bridge, but the memory support is worthless unless they give the PCI dividers for a fsb overclock to 166 which you don't even need KT333(A) for that, because current boards (IWill XP333 using MAGiK-C and EPoX 8kHA+ both have these dividers.) So, really KT333(A) is nothing worth getting excited about really.

 

[panhead49]

iwill xp333...dividers..yes..

epox 8kha+...dividers...NO..!!!

 

[Peter]

not quite folks. The CPU isn't the only one who's generating RAM traffic. Any bus mastering device does so too, if that's mass storage, sound, AGP card, LAN, whatever.

Then, the CPU bus has a much lower latency than the RAM side of things, so it does make sense to clock the RAM bus higher than the CPU bus even if you don't consider the other stuff in the system.

The faster V-Link ... what traffic do we have across this connection? Six USB 2.0 ports, 100 MBit/s LAN, 133 MByte/s PCI, 2x 133 MByte/s IDE. Still think it's 99 percent idle? Not. The original 266 MByte/s V-Link was tight with the UDMA-100 IDE already, now with UDMA-133 and USB getting faster as well it hit the ceiling.

So, good move, VIA. (And also a good move to make two flavors - KT333 as a probably pin compatible part to KT266A, for quick mainboard freshups with very little changes, and KT333A with the new southbridge and AGP 8x which both require more major redesigns of the mainboards).

regards, Peter