Asus got it rigth with the A7V266

[Nuno]

http://www.viahardware.com/a7v266_1.shtm

Scoring significantly better than the MSI K7T266Pro AND Abit brand new KG7-Raid... I think they could waited for the new rev of KT266 sheduled for 8 aug, though.

Maybe you don´t need a Rev2 KT266 chip after all, you just need a manufacturer that puts all resistors on the right places

[The PIT]

Mmm I think I'd wait until the next revision on chip before I'd buy it plus I'd see how buggy the south bridge chip is.

[Nuno]

Actually the point I was trying to make was that maybe next chip revision wasn´t needed at all... and maybe it´s due to the extremely bad reputation KT266 has, because (IMHO) of the rushed shipping of MSI boards, and all that confusion with bios revisions/resistors placement...

Even the best chipset design will be crippled on a poorly designed motherboard and/or poor bios implementation.

So if KT266 was all that disaster, if AMD revamped 751 production again because VIA failed on them producing a good performing DDR chipset, if VIA had to make another chipset revision to get it to work properly, why on earth Asus managed with a pre-production board, (surely) with a early beta bios (and Asus boards all perform better once bios rev 1003/1004 is out ), with that buggy slow 1st rev KT266 (from week 11!!) outperform for quite a good margin the speedy AMD 750? On a Abit board, usually ultra tweaked for performance? (hope that USB works on these ones, for a change )

Just some food for thought.

PS: And of course I would wait to for the next revision, just in case...

[dZeus]

what? are you saying they're not using the beloved 686b southbridge with the kt266 northbridge??

[Oboy]

what? are you saying they're not using the beloved 686b southbridge with the kt266 northbridge??

Could it be just a "A Bridge too far"


Oboy

[Nuno]

KT266 chipset has a new southbridge (can´t remember the name and too lazy to search ), it uses that new V-link stuff between NB and SB, not the regular pci bus as 686B.

[The PIT]

Unfortunatley manufacters seem to like the 686 despite it's bugs and seem to try and mate it with any via, amd solution. Msi tried it with the new amd mp chipset despite a white paper from AMD saying the 686 doesn't work with it's new chipset. Apperently they've given up the idea now.