On a lighter note, ALL CAPS, also known as Via, will announce its KT-333 chipset, taking a lead from its KT266A based boards.
While SIS was quite loud with its new 745 chipset, with support for DDR 333 in Q4, we still haven"t seen one single review of those boards. Via, on the other hand, right at the beginning of Q4 told us it would be on time and would match its DDR 333 products to meet the schedule of DDR 333.
So Q1 has started and VIA will introduce its new Athlon based chipset, likely to lead in this area, although we"re still watching and waiting to see how Via holds out against the SiS 745.
The Via chipset will feature AGP 8X -- of course "highly necessary" for Geforce 4 cards -- but don"t expect anything revolutionary from this marketing numbers and throughput. Remember, AGP 2X versus 4x was really marginal in terms of performance. Via will also introduce its V-Link 533 MB/sec on the Athlon platform as well, since we have confident information that it will use it in its up-and-coming DDR 333 Pentium 4 chipset. Just a reminder. Via uses the Vlink 266 MB/s phrase while SIS already uses its very ugly-named Mutiol which it claims will transfer 512Mb/s.
T-break.com already has quite a few facts about Asus" A7A333 board -- that already has nice spex. Don"t forget that Nvidia is working on its fresh chipset board. Which one will be faster in the first half of this new 2002 year?