VIA PT Series: VIA PCI Express for Intel
by Wesley Fink on January 31, 2005 12:01 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
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.
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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 noCygni - 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.