Slashdot Mirror
Socket-A Chipset Roundup
EconolineCrush writes: "The Tech Report has a review up of VIA's new KT333 Socket A chipset. Though it's really a review of the KT333, a total of seven different chipsets from VIA, SiS, AMD, and NVIDIA are compared to determine the uniprocessor Socket A performance king. This is definitely worth checking out if you're in the market for an AMD platform, or are curious to see how your current chipset stacks up against the latest and greatest."
Something that caught my attention in one of the photographs with this article is the funny squiggly PCB lines at the lower left in this image. Any hardware people who can enlighten me as to the function of these squiggly lines? Is this a timing device or some design artifact?
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
AMD has a nice dual-bus SMP architecture. Via has the DDR333 RAM. NVidea has the dual-banked DDR266. If we could either of these memory architectures paired up with the dual-bus SMP Athlon systems, then we would have the making of a VERY serious dual-CPU machine.
Come to think of it, I recall reading that by adding more north bridges from the 760MP chipset, you could have more than 2 Athlons on a board. If someone were to make a quad Athlon board with dual-banked DDR333, that would be a SERIOUS piece of iron for the enterprise, and at a very reasonable price. It's too bad that everyone's afraid of stepping on Intel's toes...
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).
Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
From the article:
"The pinouts on the KT333's north and south bridge chips follow VIA's V-Map standard, so the KT333 north bridge is obstensibly a drop-in replacement for the KT266 or KT266A. (Heck, it's theroetically pin-compatible with the P4X266A, for whatever that's worth.) Like those chipsets, the KT333 north bridge chip can be paired up with one of several different south bridge chips."
Which got me to thinking, "Why can't someone produce motherboards wherein components other than the CPU are quickly upgradeable?"
Aside from radical revisions, is there any reason why an I/O controller couldn't be swapped out via some sort of socketed interface?
Compare those results with what was there a year ago.
I had ALi Magic1 board for almoust a year and I'm quite happy with it (I run Linux 24/7 on it). I recently bought VIA266A board for another computer. Good stability, more features (on-board NIC, 6-channel sound, AGPpro, on-board IDE RAID), perfomance gains still look marginal to me though.
After assembling a new system consisting of an Antec case, Soyo Dragon Plus motheboard, 1GB Corsair DDR RAM, XP 1800+ CPU, 64MB GeForce 2 Ti, Sound Blaster Audigy, Yamaha CD-RW and Adaptec 2930 SCSI card (Notice the lack of cheap components), I've discovered that the VIA chipsets and Nvidia videocards have a history of not getting along, with all fingers pointing at the KT266A chipset.
Running Win2K Pro (fully updated), and the latest BIOS and drivers for everything, and not overclocking a darn thing, I'm still suffering random system lockups doing simple activites such as broswing the web. Games are too tempermental to seriously play. (It was really bad before I uninstalled the latest MS win2K rollup update - click on any browser link and have a 15% chance of the system hanging...)
I bought the Dragon Plus Motherboard based on all the wonderful online reviews of the board and chipset. Not one said anything about the lack of stability with the KT266A chipset, or any problems with lockups. Later, doing some google searching turned up message boards full of other people experiencing the exact same problems. The only "solution" discovered (and even recommended on the Soyo web site) is to drop the RAM/Bus speed to 100Mhz from 133Mhz. That kind of defeats the purpose of making a fast machine...
Now I'm trying to research a motherboard replacment (which means resintalling the OS and most software - shoot an afternoon there) based on stability first, then performance. I'm thinking nForce, but we'll see...
It's a shame to waste the money on motherboard I'm going to throw out, but there wasn't a warning to be found when I did my initial research. (Note to self: Use google more for these kinds of things)
-Matt