The rat race for technological supremacy is a never ending battle
ground. It was only a few months ago that VIA unveiled their KT333
chipset and now they have already released the KT400 chip. Taking
a look back down the memory lane, it was first the KT133 chipset which
was soon replaced by the KT133A chipset which offered quite an impressive
performance leap. Soon after that, the KT266 chipset came into action
and within a few months was replaced by the KT266A chipset which is
definitely one of the best performing chipsets released by VIA. Just
a few months ago the KT333 was released and now VIA has unveiled their
newest chipset, the KT400. When you think about it, it's kind of scary
the way things are coming up. Before you even know it, there'll be
a replacement for the KT400 pretty soon as well.
The KT400 chipset offers a number of new improvements over the older
KT333 chipset. The most emphasized feature of the KT400 chipset is
that we now have official support for AGP 8x. The AGP 8x bus is supposed
to double the AGP bus speed giving it a maximum theoretical bandwidth
of 2.1 GB/s. Since most graphic card manufactures are currently coming
out with new solutions supporting the AGP 8x standard, we could expect
considerable performance improvements in the coming months. At the
moment AGP 8x does not seem to offer breathtaking performances, nevertheless
considering how this industry is dominated by technology, things will
surely change in the coming months.
Until now, USB 2.0 support has been an optional feature which was
offered only by certain manufactures. With the KT400's Southbridge
USB 2.0 and ATA133 support comes standard, so even the most basic
KT400 board will come with impressive features at no extra cost.
Moreover, the Southbridge comes standard with 6 channel audio support
and on a more interesting note, the V-Link bus has been upgraded to
8x. The V-Link bus connects the Northbridge and the Southbridge for
communication, and now the bus speed is doubled to 533MB/s from the
former 266MB/s.
An interesting thing to note is that, hence the work KT400, this
chipset does not officially support DDR 400. Why? Well there's no
official standard set by JEDEC for DDR 400 memory and to be in line
with industry standards VIA does not provide "official"
support for this. Nevertheless the KT400 chipset is capable of running
memory at 400MHz DDR, and whether this feature will be implemented
or not and how stable it is will totally depend on the manufacture
of the specific board. To be in the competition, we can clearly expect
most of the manufactures to provide 400MHz DDR capability.
Here's the architectural view of the new KT400 chipset
