VIA PT Series: VIA PCI Express for Intel

by Wesley Fink on 1/31/2005 12:01 PM EST
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  • indianguy - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link

    I may be wrong about hard disk bottleneck but these north bridges wont make it big anyway . Nforce 5 for intel pentium 4 for is about to be released soon and it wont be a paper launch like this one. It will kick ass of all other pentium chipsets. See the case of KT890 and nforce 4. Via made so much noise about being first for AMD cpu , but never made it while nforce 4 is everywhere.

    At the same time , i should also say that these north bridges made great choice for people upgrading old computers like socket 478 , williamette and northwood . I still have one old pentium 3 with via cle 266 chipset in biostar motherboard, where Via gave a new lease of life to my old pentium 3. But apart from that i wont use or reccomend anyone buying Via.
  • Cygni - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link

    little to now = little to no
  • Cygni - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link

    I dont agree at all that hard disc performance is whats holding back PC performance. Maybe for read/write heavy apps... but for gaming and general use, HD is hardly the problem, imho. Users these days have gobs of RAM which keeps frequent disc access way down.

    And theres lots of evidence that HD's arent the bottleneck in gaming. Moving from an ATA 133 drive to a SATA 150 drive barely gives any boost at all. Even moving from ATA 100 to SATA 150 shows little boost at all. Same with using Raptors, little to now increase in FPS. Loading times? Yup. Install times? Deffinitly... but overall performance? I just cant agree.
  • indianguy - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link

    This is just a paper launch. Hard disc performance is the main bottleneck nowadays in PC performance. Anyone buying motherboard today without NCQ and sata 2 will be very foolish. Until the 8251 (or 8239) southbridge from via comes , these northbridges wont do any good. Better buy a nforce 4 with sata 2 and sata 2 capable drive from hitachi rather than waste money in these obsolete south bridges and ultra v interconnects from via. By the time 8251 south bridge is actually released by via , next gen of 945/955 chipsets with sata 2/ncq will actually be released by intel making these chipsets only sold by no name mothorboard makers who sell only on price not features . Via makes big noise with no actual performace or product availability . No wonder its running knee deep in losses all these years .
  • Wesley Fink - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link

    #19 - We carried the overclocking as far as we could with the somewhat limited options available on the Reference board. The overclocking results are at the bottom of page 6.
  • Googer - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    #18 we all know the odd are in favor of AMD winning that battle. 10-1.
  • Azsen - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Have you tried to overclock these boards, see what they are capable of?
  • Dualboy24 - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Well I hope this will help push the 775 boards into a reasonable price range with the support for AGP and PCI-E. This may increase the number of buyers for this platform... but right now I assume most enthusiasts are goinng AMD for the performance and the charts on the review do show why.

    Looking forward to the next big clash of the titans.... Dual Cores anyone?
  • Regs - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Wow would I love to see this for the AMD CPU's as well. It will dramatically help PCI-Express melt in to the market.
  • Cygni - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Impressive stuff from VIA. Should do wonders for their marketshare in the P4 market, im thinking. VIA is already doing quite well in S939 with the K8T800Pro, but its going to lose some when NF4 hits in force.
  • ChineseDemocracyGNR - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    #14,

    we don't even know if the PT894 Pro will be more expensive than the PT894, or if it's just a name to help motherboard companies promote their DualGFX products. The nVidia nForce4 SLI is $20 more expensive than the Ultra.

    As far as "restoring VIA's reputation", they're not going to focus on that when releasing new products. I have worked with their recent chipsets (PT880, PT800, KT880, KT600, K8T800, K8T800Pro) and I don't think there's anything else they could other than continue to bring good chipsets at low prices to make people that had a bad experience with them 5 years ago change their minds.
  • quanta - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    If the nForce4 Ultra/SLI mod is of any indication, the PT894[Pro] will be a crippleware scam! Unlike NVIDIA, VIA no longer have any marketing lead to afford ripping off motherboard makers. Support for DDR memory isn't going to restore VIA's reputation, especially with the emerging NVIDIA chipset on Intel platform...
  • ChineseDemocracyGNR - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Just for the curious, PCPer has pictures of PT880 Pro and PT894 Pro boards. So what? Well, the PT894 Pro is using the VT8251 southbridge. :)

    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=114&type=...

    These two look very much like Jetway boards from the color scheme. ABIT's PT880Pro is also there.
  • MS - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    "Amd socket 939 = socket 754 + 184 pin = 938 pin "

    That's not exactly how it works, there are a number of power and ground pins that are not tied to the CPU at all. In other words, the calculation comes out somewhat close to reality but that is just coincidence. Otherwise, the Socket940 which needs to use 8 extra data lines and additional clock input would have a much higher pin count than just one over 939.
  • Wesley Fink - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    ALL - We apologize for the confusion this morning. The article posted at 6AM when the VIA NDA was 12 Noon EST (9AM PST). As soon as we realized this the article came down and went back up at the correct NDA time.

    #6 - Corrected
  • Dranzerk - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Wow, this will make for a nice upgrade path for people. If they show up on market fast enough, and ample supply they should do well.
  • Jep4444 - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Socket 754 and 939 have a few useless pins. I believe 939 has an extra useless pin.

    I'm not sure if thats how it works though.
  • nserra - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    The power of the DDR dimm is drained by the amd processor, or by board? If its the board how many pins are needed? Thanks in advance.

    #avijay thanks but you didnt answer my question:
    - Amd socket 939 = socket 754 + 184 pin = 938 pin
  • avijay - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    #5 skt939 has dual channel memory controller, not single channel like skt754. I think you can add that for the extra pin in the pin count.
  • avijay - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    As always, a very nice article! Just one thing to point out:
    (Page 6) table:
    VIA PT894 Reference Board Specifications
    CPU Interface Socket 939 Athlon 64 ???

    shouldn't that be skt 775!
    you might like to correct that wesley.
  • nserra - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    DDR dimm have 184 pin so:
    - Amd socket 939 = socket 754 + 184 pin = 938 pin
    - Amd socket 754 - 184 = 570 pin (with out the on board memory controller)

    Intel new P4 socket have 775, why?
  • xsilver - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    while the above are correct
    I refer to the fsb 1066 is not working currently statment --- how can this be good for overclocking?
    its probably not working because of the AGP/PCI lock -- im an owner of the kt800 chipset and while the lock does work as they claim -- it kills itself at around 270fsb
  • k00kie - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Wow, these VIA chipsets sure have the potential to give competition to Intel's and Nvidia's offerings. I hope they execute this one properly.

    2 - Yeah, there's a pretty good chance much of what we see with these chips will be brought to whatever VIA's working on for their upcoming chipsets for AMD's K8 processors
  • Manzelle - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    The fact that the PT880 supports both AGP and PCIe makes it very attractive. I wonder if VIA will implement the same with their AMD line...
  • ChineseDemocracyGNR - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link

    Wow, I'm impressed. I didn't expect the PT894 to keep up with the 915/925 chipsets, but it's actually faster in a number of benchmarks.

    The VT8251 is very impressive too, specially if they can get it out soon for K8T890 boards. That's the best southbridge in my opinion, compared to Intel's ICH6 family and nVidia's nForce4 Ultra.

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