VIA PT Series: VIA PCI Express for Intel

Our Take

VIA is delivering a very interesting group of 3 new chipsets for the Intel Socket 775 platform. If they had been available when Intel launched the new Socket 775 some six months ago, then VIA might have been a significant player in the Socket 775 market at this point. We say that because the new VIA chipsets perform very well - at least as good as the best from Intel - and they also have features that make the upgrade path to Socket 775 a much easier choice for enthusiasts who want to upgrade. With the PT880 Pro "step-up" boards, you can bring along your AGP card and fast DDR memory, and still have an upgrade path to PCI Express in the future. Or you can keep your DDR and use a new PCIe video card and a Socket T Pentium 4.

At the Enthusiast end, the new 894 and 894 Pro chipsets deliver features available nowhere else - features like DDR2-667 support, 1066FSB on all PCIe chipsets, SATAII 3Gb/sec hard drives, RAID 5, and dual video card support for PCIe/PCIe at the top and AGP/PCIe on the 880 Pro. The excellent performance of the new VIA chipsets and the unique and desirable new features make them exceptionally competitive today. The 915/925x boards have not sold well and the new VIA options could persuade many that an upgrade to Socket 775 can be a good choice, one that is no longer prohibitively expensive from an upgrader's viewpoint.

The bigger question, however, is whether the new VIA offerings may be too little, too late. The features and performance are stand-out right now, but VIA will not actually have products to market for about a month to 6 weeks. At that time, we will also be seeing the new Intel 945 and 955x chipsets, which also support 1066FSB, DDR2-667, and SATAII - just like the new VIA chipsets - in addition to the new dual-core Intel processors and 64-bit extensions. We would hope that VIA has planned for these new CPUs and that the PT series will fully support the dual-core, which is not supported by current Intel 915/925x chipsets. If they have, and dual-core and 64-bit is no problem for the PT chipsets, then the new VIA chipsets should still compete very well with the best from Intel.

VIA will also be very aggressive in pricing the new Socket T chipsets, since part of their strategy is to undercut price points that are currently very high for 915/925X. This could mean buyers in the near future will be able to choose some very high-performance Socket 775 boards at prices that we have not yet seen in the Socket T market. This is good news for buyers and it could well hold the new Intel chipsets to more competitive pricing.

The new VIA chipsets are great at bringing to buyers what they have been asking for in Socket 775 boards. The new VIA chipsets are wonderfully flexible, allowing mix-and-match DDR, DDR2, AGP, PCIe, and dual video cards. However, they are coming very late to market - or very early - depending on whether the real competition is 915/925x or 945/955x. If VIA has done their homework and dual-core and 64-bit extensions are fully supported, then the new VIA chipsets should do very well in the market. Choice is always a good thing.