Introduction.

The VIA KT266A chipset has gained a warm reception from a large number of PC Hardware review sites and users in the few months since its release. It has quickly managed to gain the reputation of being the chipset of choice for any user wishing to get the best performance from their AMD Athlon XP, Athlon “Thunderbird” or Duron processor. With the KT266A, VIA have managed to couple together the impressive abilities of the AMD K7 family of processors which feature the impressive Alpha EV6 bus, with the increased bandwidth of DDR SDRAM.

Initial reception of the KT266A has been very good indeed with many reviewers stating that it offers a significant increase in performance over the original KT266. In fact many benchmarks (ourselves included) show the KT266 being the first Socket A chipset to out-perform the AMD-760, which up until now was the fastest Socket A offering.

We first looked at the KT266A back in December with the hugely impressive Epox EP-8KHA+ and realised how impressive it is, both in terms of speed and maturity. After the EP-8KHA+, we have moved onto another KT266A board, this time in the form of the Chaintech CT-7VJDA.

The CT-7VJDA is the first board which we have received from Taiwanese manufacturer Chaintech. For those not familiar with Chaintech, the company was founded in 1986 and produces a range of products including motherboards, display cards, audio and modem riser cards and TV set-top-box devices. Chaintech is a significant player in the European PC market with a presence both in the OEM and retail motherboard markets.

In many respects Chaintech have produced a rather interesting board in the CT-7VJDA and we found it to be one of the more interesting reviews which we have conducted at Processor Emporium. We are sure that you will probably find this review equally interesting to read.

To see how the CT-7VJDA fared in it’s test, read on...

VIA KT266.

Essentially the VIA KT266A is an enhancement of the original KT266 chipset with an improved memory controller. Like the KT266, the KT266A features support for 133 MHz Front Side Bus operation (266 DDR), 3 GB of PC-2100 SDRAM and AGP 4X.

The South Bridge controller is the VIA VT82C686B chip which features support for U/DMA 100 Hard Drive support and also support for up to 4 USB devices to be attached. The 686B also provides support for an AC97 audio codec, a feature which is becoming increasingly popular with many new motherboard designs.

Specifications.