VIA today officially launched their newest Apollo chipset, the KT333. This one will bring "lightning fast" DDR 333 support to the Athlon XP platform. As always, several sites have already tested the new chipset. You can find articles at HardOCP, Tech-Report, Xbit Labs, AnandTech and VIA Hardware. So is it a lot faster than our current KT266-A motherboards? Sure isn't, so upgrading at this point is not needed even if you're the FPS devil.

With 25% more memory bandwidth, the VIA Apollo KT333 offers the ultimate in high performance computing, excelling in the most demanding applications, and fully exploiting the unmatched performance of powerful AMD Athlon XP processors with QuantiSpeed Architecture.

The VIA Apollo KT333 also boasts the latest South Bridge technology with first to market innovations like Ultra ATA-133 in the VT8233A. Ultra ATA-133, offering 33% more bandwidth between hard drive and chipset, delivers the performance headroom needed for today’s and tomorrow’s data intensive applications, including video and gaming. The enhanced IDE controller supports all Ultra-DMA 33/66/100/133 devices including HDDs, CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMs as well as new generation BigDrive HDDs that break the previous 137GB limit on hard drive capacity and enable an exponential increase in data storage capacity for personal computing devices. [ read more ]