The worst part of the KT400...

Originally posted by TheOneKEA
I've never seen an AMD chipset in operation; how's its performance and its feature list compare to nVidia and VIA?

seeing as how the chipsets were basically discontinued early last year, the wre last updated over 1.5 years ago. as such, they lag in the feature department. i honestly don't know if they even supported ATA100, but anyway, they are far behind in terms of features now and wouldn't be worth buying.

the performance was less than Alladin's mobo(assuming that was the one that beat VIA's KT266, it might have been a SiS chipset). The KT266 was also slower. The KT266A however, was not. The KT333 is also slightly faster than the KT266A. nforce performs at the level of a KT266A or slightly below last time i checked. newer drivers or BIOS revisions may have increased performance.

[SnakeEyes]

I don't recall which IDE spec was supported with the AMD 76x chipset StealthHawk, but you might be right. For me it was a moot point though, since the A7M didn't have onboard RAID, and I'd installed my own Promise PCI IDE RAID controller for my hard drives instead. I can tell you for certain that that card is only DMA66 capable, but it still outperforms the onboard RAID on my KT3 Ultra, as well as the onboard DMA133 IDE controller built into the KT333 chipset on this motherboard. All of these problems seem to be related to an ongoing issue with Via and the PCI bus, btw, which is why my next motherboard won't be using a Via.

As far as other features, or lack thereof, the AMD 760 was fine. It only supported PC2100 memory, but allowed for decent overclocks using that memory (I ran mine stably at 150MHz fsb). The bandwidth at the time was higher than the competitors on the market (Via, Alladin), a fact which caused AMD to extend the life of the product, even though it was only meant to exist long enough for AMD's primary supporters to start volume production of DDR-capable chipsets (the forementioned AMD / Alladin). It took the KT266A before AMD finally killed the 76x chipset (er, not talking about the MP version, which lasted even longer).

BTW, If I was really feeling masochistic, I might even have decided to swap the A7M back into my case for a bit (along with the latest BIOS upgrade) keeping the rest of my current hardware, just to get a feel for the relative performance compared to my KT333(CE). I never had the same video card, processor, and faster memory on that motherboard (I upgraded everything at one time), so that I really can't say for certain this newer motherboard performs better, just that it has more features..

Er.. on the KT400, won't touch that. If Via ever fixes the PCI issue properly so that tons of experimentation and luck aren't needed to get all your hardware working at least close to the performance levels that it should be, I may reconsider. The fact that I seldom see >40k in drive benchmarks with my 2xIBM 60's on this motherboard (using either the PCI or the onboard RAID) in RAID0 mode with the KT333, while I consistently had close to 60k with the 'old' AMD 760 hybrid chipset tells me something..