VIA KT266: Second Round K.O.

Just a BIOS fix?

It seemed like the only thing that was holding us back in this case was a simple BIOS upgrade.  With a working AMI Flash Utility, we took the board NewEgg supplied us with and flashed the 1.0B9 and later the 1.0B10 BIOSes.  Both of these revisions resulted in the same problems we had with the original board MSI sent us, we could not install Windows 2000. 

It was very clear to us at this point that a simple BIOS fix wasn't going to be the answer to our problems.  At the same time, there were reports of users flashing their BIOSes to the 1.0B9 and 1.0B10 releases and not noticing any performance improvement at all.

The quick explanation was to call the poor performance of the K7T266 Pro a BIOS issue, however it became clear that the problem extended far beyond that.

The Plot Thickens

Quite possibly one of the most useful sites in determining what was causing these odd KT266 issues was OCWorkBench.  The first hint they gave us all was in this message they sent webmasters (we've cropped the majority of the message just to include the important part):

Gigabyte sent me 2 boards altogether. The first board came with P18 preproduction BIOS and the performance is bad. The second board came with P28 BIOS and the performance improved drastically by almost 40%. I flashed P28 BIOS onto the first board and maximise the settings and found out that the first board still performs badly.

This actually made a lot of sense, we weren't dealing with a BIOS issue, we were dealing with a board revision issue.  Again, it is very rare for a simple BIOS update to cause such a huge increase in performance.  What gave OCWorkBench's claims much more weight was this email we received from MSI after publishing the original article (again, here is an excerpt):

I'm MSI BIOS engineer. I'm a little confused with your testing result about MSI KT266 Pro. The value seems far low than scores tested by [ourselves].

I can't make sure you are using the right Board. (there should be no component on R127.)

Do you use the BIOS named as "A6380vsp.109" BIOS. (sign-on message date should be 033001) and do you remember to 'load BIOS Optimal Defult' when you flash completely?

Attached file is our testing result, you may find there is a big difference with your result!

The BIOS part didn't make sense but what tipped us off and helped to validate what OCWorkBench said was this sentence:

I can't make sure you are using the right Board. (there should be no component on R127.)

Why would a component (in this case a resistor) on R127 change the performance of the MSI K7T266 Pro?  Luckily, we had two different K7T266 Pros to look at and compare.