Initial conclusions
The VIA KT600 chipset is a step in the right direction. VIA needed to match NVIDIA on pure specification before they took them on from a performance viewpoint. The 'upgrade' of the Northbridge now sees full XP3200 support and precious little else. The VT8237 Southbridge gets a couple of extra USB2.0 ports and, most notably, provision for on-chip SATA. The SATA feature extends to the ability of effectively adding a coupe of extra ports via an optional SATA physical layer. The memory interface, though, has been left in VIA's preferred single channel mode.
EPoX provided us with a board that appeared to be a final, finished product. The 8KRA2+ motherboard added a number of decent features to the KT600 chipset. A decent BIOS, in both tweaking and voltage aspects, from a manufacturer who has consistently produced boards that were geared towards performance had us in high hopes. Indeed, VIA's claims that their FastStream64 memory controller had been extensively improved over previous generation's further whetted our appetite.
Imagine, then, our lack of excitement when we saw this board consistently fall behind the performance of a nForce2 Ultra 400 that was run in single channel memory mode. There's little to explain why it fell behind each and every time. We noticed that the EPoX board in our mammoth KT400A roundup was a little behind the pace of the comparison boards. This test board was updated once with a new BIOS, so will another one be needed to release the potential of the KT600 chipset, or is this as far as it will go ?.
We'll be comparing a number of retail KT600 boards in an upcoming roundup. That'll give us a definite clue as to whether the performance exhibited here is a little off or right on par for a KT600. On the basis of this sample, at least, NVIDIA won't be scurrying off looking for a rock to hide under. The bottom line is that we'll reserve overall performance judgement until further boards are tested. We'll also take that opportunity to compare the on-chip SATA performance against Intel's. For now, though, consider the KT600 as a work in progress.
Dave's Note!
This is a very early board, revision 0.3 we normally do not see boards till 0.6 if not later - we have been told by EPoX that this board is electrically sound, but the BIOS has a lot of headway in it - we wanted to get news to you about this new chipset fast.
When we got this board a few days ago it had a BIOS already on it, since then we have seen a couple of new ones both have brought a lot of speed to the scene. Clearly the board is being tweaked and setup properly by the guys at EPoX, I suspect we will see a fair few changes in coming days towards more performance. Of course we will have all the information on the main page for you.
I must publicly thank Tarinder for doing such an exceptional job, he has now flown out the country for a few days, and he turned this article around very fast for you guys.
