Review: VIAs Apollo Pro266 beats Rambus

Details on Apollo Pro266

Apollo Pro266 and KT266 will be equipped with the VT8633 as a south bridge. VIA achieves this through its new bus called V-Link, which is a serial interface between north and south bridge. Both chipsets will sport AGP 4x, six USB ports, two UltraDMA/100 interfaces and the usual selection of integrated sound and modem functionality (AC97, MC97, Ethernet 10/100, HomePNA).

Apart from DDR-SDRAM these chipsets are also able to work with standard SDRAM or Virtual Channel memory (VCM). SDRAM and VCM can be clocked at 66, 100 or 133 MHz. It is stil uncertain whether we will see motherboards that have slots for SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM at the same time, which would surely be a desirable solution for upgrading. According to VIA, this may be an option for the chipset offers functionality for both types of memory.

Apollo Pro266 works with two Pentium III processors for SMP, KT266 will be for single Athlons only - but AMDs 760 MP, scheduled for January, will fill in here.