As AMD is launching the 400Mhz FBS Barton core with Athlon XP 3200+ in May to counter the 800Mhz P4s, VIA and SiS have already gotten their chipsets ready to support that. VIA is planning to release KT600 codenamed KT400A-CE with VT8237 Southbridge while SiS has announced the SiS748 chipset last month that is paired up with SiS963L Southbridge.

How about NVIDIA? There is no upcoming nForce2 chipset from NVIDIA to officially support 400Mhz FSB Barton since nForce2 was already designed to support 400Mhz FSB in the first place. Instead NVIDIA has been constantly revising their nForce2 chipsets with newer steppings. Right now, there are two nForce2 chipset revisions in the market with A2 and A3 steppings and apparently NVIDIA has quietly added one more revision A1 which is in fact C1 Stepping. It seems like NVIDIA is getting ready for 400Mhz FSB too and indeed the newer revision that has significantly improve stability under higher FSB. The latest 8RDA+ board is using this new C1 Step nForce2 and the overclockability is simply amazing. Using a VDD of just 1.65V with CPU/RAM at DDR460 Sync, the board is able to run at 230Mhz FSB very stable!