SUMMARY: It's always hard to make a decision on what motherboard you will spend your hard earned dollars on once a new chipset or processor is released to the highly competitive motherboard market. Assisting you as best as possible, today Asher "Acid" Moses presents us with a mini roundup of four VIA KT400 based motherboards for the Athlon series of processors from Abit, MSI and Soyo!
Compared to its predecessor, the KT333 chipset, there aren't many new features added to the KT400 to make it a worthy upgrade. Its unique features include: AGP 8x support, Serial ATA, an improved V-Link bus, and of course, DDR400 memory support.
With most modern graphics chipsets featuring AGP 8x, it's logical that the KT400 supports this increased transfer rate. However, due to the fact that current games do not saturate the AGP bus with data, it is unlikely that we will see any performance difference between AGP 8x and AGP 4x for some time to come.
Similarly, being the latest hard drive technology, Serial ATA is also supported. Although at the moment you would be hard pressed to find a Serial ATA drive on store shelves, this is all starting to change and they should be widely available within the next couple of months.
Even before AMD's new 166MHz FSB processors were released, the KT400 chipset provided official support for the increased bus speed. That said, users with older motherboard chipsets such as the KT266A or KT333 can quite easily run these new processors with a BIOS update.
Aside from that, there really isn't much else the KT400 chipset has to offer that we haven't already seen in the KT333. Without further ado, let's take a look at the boards.
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