The Socket A battle between NVIDIA and VIA has been brewing for quite some time now. The competition has become very heated, so much that VIA appear to be updating their chipsets before they even hit the market. Although, this may be a slight exaggeration as the KT400A chipset was introduced quite late. Seven months after the KT400 chipset was announced at QuakeCon 2002 (August) I received a sample of VIAs reference KT400A board in March (2003). It then took another two months before I received a production board based on the KT400A chipset. Gigabyte was the first to deliver the goods and what they had to offer was quite impressive. However, there are a handful of motherboard manufacturers I expected to see KT400A boards from; so where are they?

From what I make of the whole situation manufacturers are keeping their KT400A board launches quite low key. While some are even ditching the chipset as they wait patiently to unleash their KT600 solutions. I believe most manufacturers are not making a big fuss over their new KT400A boards because they are not really anything new. Just as the KT266A was a tweaked out KT266 chipset the same applies to the KT400A. This means most manufacturers have stuck with their original KT400 board designs and simply updated the chipset. Being pin compatible this would seem like a sensible and cost effective way to offer at KT400A solution. This in term means new KT400A boards should be no more expensive than the older KT400 a parts.

When testing the VIA reference KT400A board I was more excited about an upcoming southbridge rather than the small performance increase the chipset itself had to offer. The VT8237 Southbridge will have native support for two Serial ATA channels supplying 150MB/s of bandwidth, as well as up to eight USB 2.0 ports. Naturally, my interest lied within the inbuilt Serial ATA support. During the launch of the KT400A chipset I was given the impression that the VT8237 Southbridge would be ready in time to be shipped as an added option with KT400A production boards.

For this reason I saw the slow arrival of KT400A boards to the market as a direct result of the VT8237 Southbridge, as manufacturers may have been waiting for it to become available. However, the VT8237 now looks to be coupled with the KT600 as the standard Southbridge. This being the case, manufacturers have not seen the need to produce a KT400A board leaving their current KT400 solutions to fill the gap. However, those manufacturers that have produced KT400A boards may possibly have a solution on offer that will appeal to budget users.

Todays roundup consists of eleven KT400A based motherboards from a wide range of various motherboard manufacturers. The list consists of Albatron, Acorp, AOpen, Biostar, DFI, ECS, EPoX, FIC, Gigabyte, Jetway, MSI and Soltek. I also have boards from Abit and SOYO although they dont operate correctly and as a result will be left out as they are going to move straight to the KT600 chipset. Lets have a look at each one of these eleven boards individually and find out what they have to offer...