VIA's KT333: The Athlon gets DDR333

The Internet Content Creation Suite tests these applications: Adobe Photoshop® 6.01, Adobe Premiere® 6.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, and Macromedia Flash 5.

The Office Productivity Suite tests these applications: Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft Access 2002, Netscape Communicator® 6.0, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5, WinZip 8.0, and McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

You'll find that the vast majority of your day-to-day tasks fall in the Office Productivity Suite where memory bandwidth differences are even less pronounced.

Internet Content Creation Performance SYSMark 2002 Internet Content Creation Suite VIA KT333 (Gigabyte GA-7VRXP) VIA KT266A (ASUS A7V266-E) NVIDIA nForce 420-D (ASUS A7N266) SiS 735 (ECS K7S5A) 218 215 210 195 | 0 | 44 | 87 | 131 | 174 | 218 | 262

There's not much to say here other than it's impressive to see how far VIA's DDR memory controller has come since it was originally introduced. There was a time when the SiS 735 was outperforming it but now with today's more mature KT266A and now KT333 boards, the 735 is easily outperformed by 10% or more.

Office Application Performance SYSMark 2002 Office Productivity Suite VIA KT333 (Gigabyte GA-7VRXP) VIA KT266A (ASUS A7V266-E) NVIDIA nForce 420-D (ASUS A7N266) SiS 735 (ECS K7S5A) 143 142 137 129 | 0 | 29 | 57 | 86 | 114 | 143 | 172

Nothing new here, the additional memory bandwidth doesn't do much for the office applications mentioned before although VIA's chipset performance lead continues to be 10% over the 735. Also remember that although we haven't listed them here, the AMD 760 and the older KT133/A chipsets are even slower than the SiS 735. In many cases a mere upgrade to a KT266A/KT333 platform will yield close to a 20% performance improvement for owners of older chipsets.