VIA's New Chipsets: PT880, PT894, PT894 Pro

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis

Jan. 31, 2005

Specifications

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VIA's Four-Tier Solution

StepUp

The first tier is VIA's "StepUp' technology, which is a high performance memory controller that supports DDR-II 400/533/667 as well as DDR 266/333/400 in single and dual channels. VIA's aim with StepUp is to make for easy DDR to DDR-II migration. VIA is the first company to market with DDR-II 667 support. While the chipsets support both DDR and DDR-II, it is up to the motherboard manufacturers to decide whether or not they want to support this feature on their boards. Supporting both DDR and DDR-II is a smart move and allows users to move to DDR-II at their own pace.

Performance

The new PT chipsets will support 1066 MHz FSB for Intel's latest processors. The "Ultra V-Link' support mentioned earlier allows for a 1066 MH/z link between the North and South Bridge. VIA's Flex Express architecture allows for a universal graphics interface as well as "DualGFX Express,' allowing the use of dual graphics cards. Each chipset has their own implementation of Flex Express. The PT880 Pro supports PCI-Express and AGP 8x, while the PT894 supports PCI-Express and the PT894 Pro supports dual PCI-Express. Similar to the StepUp situation, the ability to use both AGP and PCI-Express on a single board offers awesome upgrade capabilities.

Generally, the South Bridge bandwidth has been taken up by IDE and SATA drives as well as peripherals and multimedia devices. VIA's Flex Express solution distributes peripheral bandwidth across the chipset's North and South Bridge to minimize potential bottlenecks. The high-bandwidth PCI peripherals go through the North Bridge which reduces latencies and the occurrences of bottlenecks between the North and South Bridges. There is support for up to 4 PCI-Express x1 devices such as gigabit Ethernet, HDTV tuner, SCSI, and RAID cards.

Audio

"Audio' is the third tier and features VIA's Vinyl HD Audio, Vinyl Audio Codecs and Controllers as well as QSound support. QSound offers advanced audio gaming support with Q3D, QEM and QXpander. Q3D offers DirectSound, DirectSound3D, A3D and I3DL2 support as well as advanced 3D positioning and 7.1 speaker systems. QEM features EAX and EAX2.0 compatible environment simulation while QXpander allows for mono to 3D and 3D stereo sound stage synthesis and enhancement for headphones and stereo speakers.

DriveStation

The fourth and final tier is dubbed "DriveStation,' which features SATAII support, "V-RAID' with RAID 5 support (in addition to RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD support, etc.) and a Port Multiplier. VIA's DriveStation allows for independent transfer paths to each SATA drive. Additionally, VIA's full Port Multiplier support allows for the connection of multiple hard drives to a single SATA connection. This allows for up to 60 hard drives connected to a single computer.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: VIA's Four-Tier Solution
Page 3: The New Chipsets
Page 4: Performance / Conclusion

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