|
Now the image above is sneaky. VIA's own product literature on KT400A mentions (obviously) the KT400A northbridge (christened VT8377A) and also the pictured southbridge (VT8237). And while the northbridge is present and correct, there's no shipping KT400A solution, to my knowledge, that ships with the VT8237 southbridge. 8237 is basically 8235CE with support for SATA as an interface to its IDE controllers, and another couple of USB2.0 ports. Otherwise, it's an identical bridge. That would be well and good, except it doesn't ship on current boards, instead relegated to the oft delayed KT600 rollout.
So, while you'll see boards in this roundup with SATA (the selling point of the new bridge), they wont be provided by a VIA south.
So with that out of the way, let's take a look at a chipset diagram featuring the bridge that isn't to be, discarding its SATA and extra USB2.0 and renaming it the VT8235CE instead. ph33r my MS Paint 'skillz'
What do we get? A pretty full featured chipset as it happens, for manufacturers to build a decent base around. We have a 6-channel audio solution that's pretty good, an Ethernet MAC, support for DDR400 memory, USB2.0, up to 6 PCI slots from VIA's recently redeveloped PCI controller, AGP8X support for the latest graphics cards, and all the other good stuff you'd come to expect from a late life Socket A solution.
Wrong. With VIA dithering over support for 200MHz front side bus Athlon processors (namely XP3200+) and leaving that for KT600, KT400A doesn't support them. nForce2 Ultra 400 has it, it would have been nice to have a competing VIA solution to run the CPU too. KT600 is late as it is, hopefully it'll appear very soon since it appears it's very quick.
But apart from that minor spec faux pas, it does well in terms of features. There's plenty of scope for adding value to the boards based around the chipset too, since all manner of extra gubbins has been slapped on to the base chipset spec in the boards you're about to read about. But you can do that on NVIDIA boards too, so no real big deal.
But an encouraging start, even for this NVIDIA blinded reviewer that likes his ASUS A7N8X Deluxe 2.0. I was happy to swap it out for the following beasts, and that's saying something.
We better take a look at the boards we're testing then. All eight of them. Yikes.
|
