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Socket A Chipsets: SiS 735 and VIA KT266A
By Kelly Lu - December 20, 2001
The AMD Athlon processor has now been around for more than two years now and we've seen both the actual chip and also the platform develop to relative maturity. Looking back now, it’s kind of amazing to notice the number of chipsets made for the Athlon processor that have come and gone--we’ve come a long way! Though today we’re looking at two of the most-recently available platforms for the Athlon processor, the SiS735 and the VIA KT266A, let’s start by running through a brief history of the development of chipsets for this speedy processor.
If you'll remember, the first chipset made for the Athlon was the AMD Irongate 750, and it seems very primitive now when compared to today’s chipsets due to the fact that it only provided native support for PC100 SDRAM and ATA-66 (the fastest ATA standard at the time). Despite it being much of a “primal” chipset even for back then mainly due to its support for only PC100 SDRAM (while Intel was using both RDRAM and PC133 with their then-upcoming chipsets), the AMD 750 was actually adopted by quite a few users. Even I set up a system based on this chipset with an Athlon (classic) 650MHz, which I was still using as my primary system up to a few weeks ago.
Just a few months after the release of the AMD 750, the now-popular Taiwanese chipset maker, VIA Technologies, introduced their KX133 Athlon chipset. Though this chipset was very-much identical to the 750 in terms of features, it offered one significant improvement: PC133 SDRAM support. Through asynchronous FSB/memory clocking, the KX133 was able to pair up a 100MHz (DDR) FSB Athlon processor with 133MHz SDRAM, which, along with some performance-oriented improvements, was what really helped the Athlon shine above the competition.
Shortly after the release of the KX133 and in time for the newly-release Thunderbird-core Athlon processor, VIA introduced the KT133. This chipset was basically identical to the KX133 except that it provided support for the new Socket A physical interface, while the KX133 only provided support for the older Slot A interface. It would also later provide ATA-100 support as well. Due to the Thunderbird’s huge success (which is probably an understatement) and the fact that the KT133 was the only available solution for Socket A processors (for a while, at least), VIA saw huge success from their chipset in the market; in fact, the introduction of the KX133 and KT133 was largely responsible for why VIA controls so much more of the market now than they did previously.
Then came AMD’s introduction of the 266MHz FSB (133MHz DDR) Athlon processor which sparked the much-anticipated adaptation of DDR SDRAM into the market. First up came AMD’s solution, the 760 chipset and then VIA’s KT266. Both of these chipsets were almost identical in features (the KT266 was actually just a modified KT133 with DDR memory support) and provided the Athlon with much-needed memory bandwidth in the form of PC1600 or PC2100 DDR SDRAM. Utilizing this extra memory bandwidth, the Athlon really took off. VIA also released a revised version of their popular KT133 chipset, called KT133A, which was able to run a 266MHz FSB Athlon processor with PC133 SDRAM. That chipset never really caught on since DDR memory benefited the Athlon so much and the price difference wasn’t big enough to make people shy away from the superior DDR platform...
...which brings us to our main topic today; just about a year after the first introduction of DDR SDRAM to the Athlon processor, we’re now seeing the second round of DDR chipsets being released into the market. Today we look at two of the newer chipsets available for the Athlon processor, the SiS 735 and the VIA KT266, as well as two motherboards that are based on these two chipsets, the ECS K7S5A and the DFI AD70-SR, respecitively. Both of these chipsets featured here provide more features, better performance and are more mature than the chipsets of the past. Which one is a better choice for you? The answer is actually a lot simpler than you might think...
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