DDR Athlon Chipsets

Currently, there are four DDR Athlon products orbiting the market: ALi's MaGiK-1, the AMD760, the SiS735 and VIA's KT266. Although the ALi MaGiK-1 scored nicely with SYSmark, it could not fulfil similar performance expectations for the other benchmarks. In fact, its performance was not much better than PC133 SDRAM, which is a bit embarrassing. The upcoming B-stepping is supposed to provide more performance.

SiS impressed us with their high performance 735 chipset . Unfortunately, there are hardly any motherboards with this chipset available now. I still hope that SiS is working on this, because otherwise this powerful chip might very well die an untimely death.

Newcomer: The VIA KT266 is not as fast as the AMD760, but is expected to dominate the market due to its attractive price/performance ratio.

ALi's DDR chipset does not perform much better than fast systems based on SDRAM. The B-stepping is supposed to change that soon.

VIA's KT266 is finally on its way to market now. Though it also failed to meet some of our performance expectations, its success should be guaranteed because VIA is a big player on the chipset market.

One chipset is left that currently is the only one to go with if you are a power user. Initially, nobody knew if AMD was going to send this chipset into full battle, as they still dissociate from being a chipset maker. Fortunately they did. AMD760 may be more expensive than ALi MaGiK-1 or KT266, but the performance benefit is absolutely worth the money.