CeBIT 2002 Days 2 and 3: Deluge Of Motherboards

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While the southern part of Germany was graced with warm summer temperatures, the visitors at the CeBIT had to put up with winter chill. On the second day of the world's largest IT event, the editors at Tom's Hardware paid a visit to numerous manufacturers. Most of the motherboard manufacturers talked quietly about the new VIA chipset, the KT400A. It's clear that VIA will not be launching a new "A" version to follow the introduction of the KT333 chipset DDR333 For Athlon: VIA KT333 vs. KT266A . Instead, within the next few weeks, VIA will be coming out with the VIA KT400A, which is supposed to be the first chipset for AMD Athlon that supports a memory clock of up to 200 MHz (DDR400).

At the moment, it's difficult to say what the latency of the module will be in practice, but in any case, the bandwidth of DDR memory for AMD and Intel platforms should increase. In the end user segment, DDR333 memory is unavailable, much less the corresponding chipset, but nevertheless, a few motherboard manufacturers have already prepared for the next level - DDR400. There's also an interesting bit of news about the upcoming Intel 845E and 850E chipsets: the memory interface of these components have been optimized. It remains to be seen if the Intel 845E with 133 MHz FSB will perform better than the Intel 845. With the Intel 850, it's a similar picture: in our last comparison Behind The Silicon Curtain: Exclusive Test Of The P4/2666 With 533 MHz Rambus , we examined the Intel Pentium 4/2666 in combination with the Intel 850. If the Intel 850E with 533 MHz RDRAM increases performance even further, then this will put it at some distance ahead of DDR266 and Intel 845D (E)