VIA's KT600 Looks Impressive

[classy]

Kyle reviewed a KT600 reference board, here. It looks rather impressive. The memory controller looks very efficent. It wins gaming benchmarks across the board. Except for one game benchmark it was on average 3-5% faster. Nice. Check it out.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Looks pretty good May be a little late to compete with the nForce2... unless it is priced around the $60 mark...

 

[S0me1X]

The KT600 should be a bit cheaper, and you only have to use one stick of ram. However, the Athlon XP is at the end of their line, so maybe not as many people will buy new KT600/nforce2 motherboards.

 

[NicColt]

this is the first article I've read there in a while and it kinda brings my fait back with them, it was actually a really good article.

I was actually a little surprised at how good it did and specially going up against the nv 400 Ultra and from an early reference board. Kudos to via for this one. One thing I do know is that the chipset will be the same price as the KT400a which is a cheaper chipset than the NV 400 Ultra.

>the Athlon XP is at the end of their line, so maybe not as many people will buy new KT600/nforce2 motherboards

What I'm thinking here is not the Athlon64 but can can a KT600/NV 400 Ultra combo with XP3200 beat the price of an i875P/Pentium 4 3.0 GHz 800 FSB combo. If you look at this Pricegrabber link you'll see what I think is the first time in history that Intel is selling a faster CPU cheaper than AMD. No one can deny that the P4 3.0 800FSB is faster and can overclock better than the end of the line XP's and if you add ICH5 RAID and CSA Gigabit LAN on intel boards, just how can you compete with that.

 

[Boonesmi]

ive always liked via... im glad it looks like they have something to compete with the nforce2 finally

 

[Soulkeeper]

too bad it wasn't released to coincide with the 3200+
nvidia beat them to the punch, ohh well

needing only one dimm and getting the same or better performance than the nforce2 in dual channel mode is a definate plus

 

[Peter]

... so is the fact that KT600 is pin compatible with KT400A; and 8237 is pin compatible with 8235CE. Not too much work being required to migrate existing designs, I'd expect KT600 boards to pop up really soon.

 

[NokiaDude]

So . . my . . brand new Abit AT7-MAX2 is already outdated?!!? NOOOOOOOOO!!!

 

[mosco]

has any company said they are going to release boards that use it? I am about to build my first pc and i am very interested in this.

 

[iloveamd]

Yeah. It looks good... But I'm gonna wait for the Athlon 64s before I get a new board.

 

[paperfist]

Originally posted by: mosco
has any company said they are going to release boards that use it? I am about to build my first pc and i am very interested in this.

Asus is releasing one, I'm sure more will follow. Here's the news link from Anandtech.

 

[Boonesmi]

im hoping the epox board makes it to market soon... if so it will probably be my next motherboard

 

[Macro2]

Looks like VIA will be relegated to the ECS, Biostar and AS$rock end of the AMD mutha'board market.
They recently quit making P4 motherboards, too.
Before that they bucked Intel and lost...

They be on a loosin' streak.

Too bad the beta-ed us to death with all their revisions and 4 in 1s...

OTOH, the KT600 is not bad for a budget mobo...
Maybe they can do something with opteron and A64...

 

[Boonesmi]

Looks like VIA will be relegated to the ECS, Biostar and AS$rock end of the AMD mutha'board market.

im not sure why you say that... it looks like all the big mobo makers have kt600 plans

edit to add..
a couple days ago i was looking at the specs for several kt600 based boards (from big name manufactures)
asus, epox and MSI

a lot of the big name guys didnt produce kt400a boards since they knew the kt600 was so close (and they didnt like the kt400a since it didnt support 400mhz fsb)

 

[Macro2]

RE:"im not sure why you say that... it looks like all the big mobo makers have kt600 plans"

THOSE are big mobomakers, just low end. VIA just can't command the price the nforce2 gets. KT600 boards will likely be in the $50-80 range...down with SIS.

 

[Boonesmi]

asus, epox and MSI are low end??

i would imagine in the next month we will see all the performance guys have a kt600 solution (since the kt600 looks like it will perform at about the same level as the nf2, plus it will be cheaper )

 

[Boonesmi]

link
those numbers dont look like a "budget" board to me

 

[mechBgon]

Hexus did a writeup too, but the conclusion was that KT600 was coming in behind nForce2... in single-channel mode. Still, if VIA can get back in the game, that's fine by me.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Cough! this thread is dusty!:clock: They use a reference board 6weeks ago and get better performance and Hexus gets with a Epox version a couple days ago..Hmmmmm :light: very unimpressive so far a lot of tweaking needed with Epox's to get where the reference board was at no doubt about it.

EPoX provided us with a board that appeared to be a final, finished product. The 8KRA2+ motherboard added a number of decent features to the KT600 chipset. A decent BIOS, in both tweaking and voltage aspects, from a manufacturer who has consistently produced boards that were geared towards performance had us in high hopes. Indeed, VIA's claims that their FastStream64 memory controller had been extensively improved over previous generation's further whetted our appetite.

Imagine, then, our lack of excitement when we saw this board consistently fall behind the performance of a nForce2 Ultra 400 that was run in single channel memory mode. There's little to explain why it fell behind each and every time. We noticed that the EPoX board in our mammoth KT400A roundup was a little behind the pace of the comparison boards. This test board was updated once with a new BIOS, so will another one be needed to release the potential of the KT600 chipset, or is this as far as it will go ?.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Dammit Mech! you beat my by like 90seconds

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
Dammit Mech! you beat my by like 90seconds

Cheetahs are (usually) faster than gorillas

 

[First]

We got the same results as Hexus with Epox's KT600; still a slower and poorer overclocker than nForce2 Ultra 400. We'll see if the latest Epox BIOS does anything for performance. Testing now...

 

[Boonesmi]

its not like the epox board tested was a "finished product"... once they start shipping the boards then ill trust the benchmarks

heck i remember the 10k raptor sata drive, reviews came out showing how poor the performance was. a week later WD gets the drive bios finished up and its a killer drive

 

[Boonesmi]

plus did you read the note at the end of the hexus review?

Dave's Note!

This is a very early board, revision 0.3 we normally do not see boards till 0.6 if not later - we have been told by EPoX that this board is electrically sound, but the BIOS has a lot of headway in it - we wanted to get news to you about this new chipset fast.

When we got this board a few days ago it had a BIOS already on it, since then we have seen a couple of new ones both have brought a lot of speed to the scene. Clearly the board is being tweaked and setup properly by the guys at EPoX, I suspect we will see a fair few changes in coming days towards more performance. Of course we will have all the information on the main page for you.

I must publicly thank Tarinder for doing such an exceptional job, he has now flown out the country for a few days, and he turned this article around very fast for you guys.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb
We got the same results as Hexus with Epox's KT600; still a slower and poorer overclocker than nForce2 Ultra 400. We'll see if the latest Epox BIOS does anything for performance. Testing now...

How did you make out with the new bios Evan?