Lets talk about the new VIA chipset first off.

This new chipset has some very nice intergraded features over its earlier OLDER brother (the kt400a):

So what exactly are some of these features VIA has decided to include and impress upon us. Lets take a closer look at VIA’s answer to the Nforce2’s dual channel DDR & Audio we have all come to know and love so much:

VIA FastStream64™ Technology uses an expanded array of prefetch buffers to reduce latency in the memory controller, extending performance at a lower transistor cost than dual channel implementations. With a 266/333/400MHz processor bus and supporting DDR266/333/400 memory, the VIA Apollo KT600 provides lightning fast access to system memory and can reach a peak bandwidth of 3.2GB/sec, enabling the full performance potential of the fastest AMD Athlon™ XP processors to be harnessed.

The six-channel surround sound supported in the VT8235 and VT8237 South Bridges, combined with the high quality VIA Vinyl Six-TRAC external codec with advanced Stylus driver support, enables a rich, vibrant sound that will enhance the user experience when listening to music, watching movies, or playing games.

The VIA VT8237 is the latest in a series of market leading South Bridge chips from VIA integrating state of the art I/O innovation. With its native dual channel Serial ATA controller, the VT8237 provides direct support for two Serial ATA devices at a bandwidth of 150MB/s per port and its unique SATAlite™ interface expands support for two additional SATA devices through an optional external Serial ATA PHY. Featuring support for RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1, the native VIA RAID controller optimizes system performance by ensuring the highest disk data transfer rates and provides the most advanced fault tolerant solution for optimum data integrity. It also comes with a user friendly software configuration program for easy disk array set up in all the latest Microsoft® Windows® and Linux environments, and supports both Serial ATA and Parallel ATA standards.

Thankfully ABIT has basicay decided to include all of these impressive features (excluding the modem and using only 5 pci slots).

Those all sound very impressive. We will see ABITs utilization of them soon as well as a comparison of the KV7 to the NF7-S. Pound for pound we will see who owns who and which is a better deal.

One thing I don’t quite understand is the lacking of FireWire. With DV camcorders, external HD’s, and other assorted high-speed external components that only use the FireWire port, or even ones that offer both usb2 and FireWire. As we all know, FireWire is faster 9 out of 10 times. So, with that being said I can only scratch my head in wonder with VIA not including this feature by default. Also strangely VIA has decided to not include dual DDR like we all expected, but there FastStream 64 does sound promising.

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