VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

The ALi MAGiK1 chipset continues to dominate SYSMark 2000.  As you all should know by now, we're not incredibly fond of this benchmark however BAPCo is planning on refreshing the test suite very soon so we should find ourselves transitioning away from SYSMark 2000 in the next few weeks.

Unfortunately the K7T266 Pro with the B9 BIOS would not complete a full SYSMark 2000 run however judging by the B10's 1.8% performance improvement, we're not missing out on too much.

Very low latency operation (almost as low as the AMD 760), combined with much higher bandwidth figures (ranging from 7 - 12% in most cases), give the modified K7T266 Pro with the 1.0B9 BIOS a performance advantage over the AMD 760.  The KT266 in this case was able to finish the tests in 96% of the time of the AMD 760.

While the original KT266 didn't perform too poorly in this test to begin with, the modified MSI board proved to be much more attractive (9% more attractive if you're the statistical type). 

We only included one gaming test in this comparison simply because the boards locked up too much in the rest of our tests and the standings remain relatively similar across the other tests as well.  We will provide a more thorough set of benchmarks (through our usual test suite) once boards mature.

Again we ran into a situation where the B9 BIOS would not regularly complete our test, but the B10 update managed to offer a 17% increase in performance over the same board we tested earlier with an earlier BIOS and a resistor in a different location.  If you're beginning to wonder exactly what R126/127 do, you're not alone.