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The most obvious modification to the Apollo Pro 266 is the support for DDR RAM (PC1600 / PC2100) and its 2.1GB/s of available memory bandwidth (at 133MHz). This is an important step forward for general market acceptance of DDR SDRAM as it will ease the progression away from PC100 / PC133 RAM. The reason this is important is because DDRs chief opponent, RDRAM (RAMBUS), is being pushed quite heavily by Intel for their new baby the P4. While RDRAM provides a powerful memory solution, it also packs a large monetary punch (although the price has been coming down as of late). As many have noted, however, Crucial has been selling their DDR RAM at a similar price to their PC133 which makes it a very tempting solution.
A less obvious addition to the Apollo Pro 266 is the introduction of V-Link: VIAs answer to Intels two year old IHA (Intel Hub Architecture). Up until the Pro 266, VIA chipsets relied on the 33MHz PCI to connect the North Bridge and South Bridge. The obviously problem with this is that of limited bandwidth. At 33MHz, the 32-bit PCI bus can muster about 133MB/s of bandwidth that needs to be shared with not only all of the PCI cards but the data traffic between the North and South Bridges as well. This was fine back in the day, but with todays technology this setup has become a little outrageous.
In 1999, Intel introduced their Hub Architecture with the i810 chipset which creates a dedicated data channel for the traffic between the North and South bridges. This, of course, was only available on Intel chipsets until VIA came along with the Apollo Pro 266 and V-Link, which perform essentially the same task as Intels solution (which is present in all 8xx-based chipsets by the way). This will give VIA-based mobos the same growing room as that of Intel-based boards. This is the reason why control over the PCI bus has moved down to the South Bridge, since there is no longer a need to use it to connect the two bridges together.
Without further ado, lets take a look at the Soyo SY-7VDA and its implementation of the Pro 266.
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I just purchased one of these motherboards monday and have placed it into my comp at home with an 866 PIII attached and DDR pc2100 512 meg. I have found a slight difficulty with the board. To utilize the sound blaster cards DVD and Audio and a modem it takes some juggling in the slots to get them right on the money regarding IRQ conflicts. Also I found that with unregistered DDR I could only use two of the ram slots on the board anymore than that and the board has the error code beeps on startup. Overall I am happy now that I have a board that does not have the 815i chipset memory limitations. I do have a question how do I work with the motherboard to perform overclocking on the Intel PIII chip?
Sean Wolff
Thanks,
Anthony