Review: VIAs Apollo Pro266 beats Rambus
Conclusion
Our demo system with a preproduction chipset ran rock solid and fast. We expect to see off-the-shelves versions of this chipset this year, they might even show a little better performace due to BIOS optimizations. According to recent announcements by Micron and other manufacturers DDR memory will only be 10 per cent more costly than single data rate SDRAM. This still makes it only half as expensive as RDRAM. Unless there will be no unexpected difficulties with DDR technology, Intel and Rambus will see a long cold winter.
How DDR memory works can be read up in our Report DDR-SDRAM - is it a Rambus killer? Currently this feature is only available in german, please bear with us. An extensive review of VIAs first DDR-board will be available on October 24 2000. (mec/nie)
(Edit: The german version of the longer report is up now. International readers may take a look, though, for benchmark diagrams and schematics speak for themselves, we think. Thanks for your patience.)
(Translation by Nico Ernst. This story is (c) 2000 by IDG Interactive GmbH. All rights reserved.)
Other English releases:
Review: Pentium 4 at 1,4, 1,5 and 1,6 GHz