CALROG.COM: KT333 Chipset Introduces Athlon CPUs to PC2700 Memory

KT333 Chipset Introduces Athlon CPUs to PC2700 Memory
By C. Rogers, 03.02
(Edited 05.05)

Unless a PC enthusiast has been living under a rock for a great while, the popular buzzword for Athlon platforms has been PC2700-- the newest DDR-SDRAM standard which allows a "double-pumped" 166 MHz bus. While some smaller manufacturers have been touting support for PC2700 memory, large-scale chipset manufacturers have not yet released a solution for the masses. This was until late February, when Via Technologies announced its KT333 chipset.

The predecessor to Via's KT333 was the KT266A chipset, which only supported PC2100 DDR-SDRAM. PC2100 memory runs on an "effective" 266 MHz bus, which runs in parity with today's crop of Athlon XP chips. However, the KT333 solution weds the Athlon XP processor with a northbridge chipset allowing support for PC2700 memory, allowing a 25% increase in bus speed.

In conjunction with today's batches of Athlon XPs, PC2700 SDRAM can only amount to 2-5% improvements in major benchmarks. This is not a revolutionary boost in performance, but when AMD gives the Athlon XP a boost in its FSB later this year, the KT333 chipset will be a much more attractive solution.

Also introduced with the KT333 chipset is support for ATA-133 devices. In theory, ATA-133 standard has a 33% performance boost over the existing ATA-100 standard. Nonetheless, this increase in performance will only be recognized on hard-drive intensive tasks.

Via tends to phase out production of the KT266A chipset overtime, and make the KT333 the premier solution for Athlon-based motherboards. Asus and MSI are two popular motherboard manufacturers that will be initially releasing KT333-based solutions.

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