VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

Memory Bandwidth - SiSoft Sandra 2001

Continuing the Linpack performance trend, the Sandra Integer STREAM test paints a much different picture from the one we first saw with the KT266 chipset.  In this case, the K7T266 Pro (KT266) is able to offer 22% more memory bandwidth than the unmodified board we originally tested with.  In doing so, it actually provides more bandwidth than the ASUS A7A266 (ALi MAGik1), which was the previous champ in this benchmark.

Using the leaked 1.0B10 BIOS the performance isn't as high, but still greater than the original setup.

The K7T266 Pro 1.0B9 is able to offer almost 12% more memory bandwidth than the AMD 760 here as well.

Remember that the Sandra STREAM scores are the most representative of real world performance of all of our bandwidth tests because of the nature of the operations that the test performs on the data being transferred.  

The picture doesn't change much as the focus shifts to FPU operations although the performance improvement the B9 BIOS offers drops down to 17%.  Its advantage over the AMD 760 decreases as well to just fewer than 7%.