Via skipping a KT333a chipset and going for KT400

I thought that with the small performance gain when the KT333 was compared with the KT266a motherboards released that Via were sure to do a better release but it seems their next target is a KT400a chipset. This means a 200Mhz DDR bus, AMD performance on this platform must be challenging for the performance crown again with Via having just release their 333DDR platform to the P4.

Not really that surprising considering the fact that the performance increase from 266 to 333 can be considered negligible. Problem is, how long till the memory is available. Even the DDR333 memory is scarcely available.

Its not that surprising but this has been the case with KT133, KT133a, KT266, KT266a, KT333, K400a... So a little surprising, well to me at least
333 ram is indeed a scarce resource. I wonder if they have a deal setup with any particular memory manufacturer to provide substantial amounts of 400DDR ram...

True, true. Godo thing is that once in a while, they do something unexpected to shake up the scene and their competitors Hopefully there'll be a greater performance jump and new features in there as well. In all the benchmarks with the P4 paired with RDRAM, the KTxxx always loses in terms of mem bandwidth

That would be a good thing to do for AMD. It would be even better if they could bundle the RAM with the mobo; although that's out of their control

The new SiS645DX (I think thats its name)chipset for the P4 beats or matches the P4 Rdram combination though, giving the world a cheap DDR solution with the same or superior performance.

I think I'm still going to try and hold out until the hammer series is released, and maybe the Intel 64bit offering.

That's interesting. I never really paid any attention to that chipset. It's time to re-read those articles/benchmarks again!

Agreed. From what I can see, the jump from 266->333->400 will not be a huge one. I'm completely satisfied with my XP1600 right now. In fact, I think the system I'm using will last me for quite some time.