SOYO-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Motherboard (Platinum Edition)

Introduction

The rat race for technological supremacy is a never ending battle ground. It was only a few months ago that VIA unveiled their KT333 chipset and now they have already released the KT400 chip. Taking a look back down the memory lane, it was first the KT133 chipset which was soon replaced by the KT133A chipset which offered quite an impressive performance leap. Soon after that, the KT266 chipset came into action and within a few months was replaced by the KT266A chipset which is definitely one of the best performing chipsets released by VIA. Just a few months ago the KT333 was released and now VIA has unveiled their newest chipset, the KT400. When you think about it, it’s kind of scary the way things are coming up. Before you even know it, there’ll be a replacement for the KT400 pretty soon as well.

The KT400 chipset offers a number of new improvements over the older KT333 chipset. The most emphasized feature of the KT400 chipset is that we now have official support for AGP 8x. The AGP 8x bus is supposed to double the AGP bus speed giving it a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s. Since most graphic card manufactures are currently coming out with new solutions supporting the AGP 8x standard, we could expect considerable performance improvements in the coming months. At the moment AGP 8x does not seem to offer breathtaking performances, nevertheless considering how this industry is dominated by technology, things will surely change in the coming months.

Until now, USB 2.0 support has been an optional feature which was offered only by certain manufactures. With the KT400’s Southbridge USB 2.0 and ATA133 support comes standard, so even the most basic KT400 board will come with impressive features at no extra cost.

Moreover, the Southbridge comes standard with 6 channel audio support and on a more interesting note, the V-Link bus has been upgraded to 8x. The V-Link bus connects the Northbridge and the Southbridge for communication, and now the bus speed is doubled to 533MB/s from the former 266MB/s.

An interesting thing to note is that, hence the work KT400, this chipset does not officially support DDR 400. Why? Well there’s no official standard set by JEDEC for DDR 400 memory and to be in line with industry standards VIA does not provide “official” support for this. Nevertheless the KT400 chipset is capable of running memory at 400MHz DDR, and whether this feature will be implemented or not and how stable it is will totally depend on the manufacture of the specific board. To be in the competition, we can clearly expect most of the manufactures to provide 400MHz DDR capability.

Here’s the architectural view of the new KT400 chipset