I can't remember any year that had more chipset releases than 2001. The majority of those were so-called 'DDR-chipsets', as those core logics would support the memory type DDR-SDRAM. It was no big surprise that after AthlonXP won the 'Best CPU' readers' choice award, we would see an Athlon-chipset win the 'Best Chipset' award. VIA's Apollo KT266A chipset was the readers' favorite, and once again with a commanding lead over the others.

When VIA released Apollo KT266A in September 2001, everybody was surprised about its impressive performance. Nobody had ever expected that a VIA chipset could be so fast. The release of Apollo KT266A marked a major image change for VIA. Almost overnight the Taiwanese chipset maker had become a respected performance chipset provider. Even NVIDIA with its dual-DDR nForce super chipset had to bow down in front of VIA. nForce was never able to reach the performance of Apollo KT266A, even though nForce comes with the superior dual-channel DDR memory design.

Congratulations to Wenchi, Richard, Shane and all others at VIA, for receiving the first THG Readers' Choice Award for 'Best Chipset 2001'. Get that DDR333-stuff ready, folks!

The Winners Speak

"VIA places great emphasis on research and development, so we were particularly pleased with the innovative VIA Apollo KT266A, which took chipset performance to a whole new level. We are absolutely delighted that so many of the knowledgeable readers of Tom's Hardware Guide have experienced the superior performance benefits and awarded the KT266A as 'Best Chipset of the Year'. " Wen Chi Chen, President & CEO, VIA Technologies, Inc.