Introduction
Our review today gives us a chance to get our first look at VIA's newest chipset, the KT600. Gigabyte's GA-7T600 is one of the first boards to market with this chipset and we're really looking forward to putting it through it's paces. Featuring a 400MHz front side bus, a reworked memory controller and an integrated SATA/RAID controller VIA hopes to regain some ground for lost to NVIDIA's successful Nforce2 series. VIA also carries over some of the features from the KT400A Chipset, such as; Six-Trac (six channel) AC'97 audio, MC '97 modem and VIA MAC 10/100 LAN.
Below is a nice chart from VIA's website comparing the KT600 and KT400A
| Features | VIA Apollo KT600 | VIA Apollo KT400A |
| North Bridge | | |
| Processor Support | AMD Athlon⢠XP | AMD Athlon⢠XP |
| Front Side Bus | 266/333/400MHz | 266/333MHz |
| Memory Bus | 266/333/400MHz | 266/333/400MHz |
| AGP Support | AGP4X/8X | AGP4X/8X |
| Memory Type | DDR266/333/400 | DDR266/333/400 |
| Max. Memory | 4.0GB | 4.0GB |
| South Bridge | VT8237 | VT8235CE |
| North/South Bridge Link | 8X V-Link (533MB/sec) | 8X V-Link (533MB/sec) |
| Integrated Audio | VIA Vinyl Six-TRAC six- channel AC'97 audio | VIA Vinyl Six-TRAC six- channel AC'97 audio |
| Integrated Modem | MC'97 | MC'97 |
| Integrated Network Controller | VIA MAC 10/100 Ethernet | VIA MAC 10/100 Ethernet |
| PCI Devices/Slots | 6 slots | 6 slots |
| IDE | Dual Channel Serial ATA directly supports two SATA devices SATAlite⢠interface expands support for two additional SATA devices through optional external Serial ATA PHY Dual Channel Parallel ATA (up to 4 devices) | Parallel ATA (up to 4 devices) |
| VIA RAID | RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1Supports SATA and ATA-133 standards | |
| USB | 8 ports | 6 ports |
| Super I/O | LPC Super I/O | LPC Super I/O |
| IO APIC | Yes | Yes |
| Power Management | ACPI/APM/PCI/PM | ACPI/APM/PCI/PM |
Here we have block diagram and architecture images
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