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

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis

Jan. 31, 2005

Specifications

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The New Chipsets

VIA PT880 Pro Chipset

The VIA PT880 Pro chipset is aimed at the performance mainstream market segment, competing against the 865/875 chipsets and allows for a good stepping-stone solution during the PCI-Express transition. The PT880 Pro fully supports the latest Pentium 4 and Celeron processors and 1066 MHz FSB. The PT880 Pro supports DDR 266/333/400 as well as DDR2 400/533/667. The PT880 Pro is the only chipset on the market that supports full AGP 8x as well as PCI-Express graphics cards. With the PT880 Pro, AGP and PCI-E graphics cards can be used at the same time, allowing for multi-display support for up to four monitors. There are also two PCI-Express x1 connections to the South Bridge.

VIA PT894 Chipset

The VIA PT894 chipset is aimed at the performance mainstream segment and is providing an alternative to the 915 chipset. Like the PT880 Pro, the PT894 has full support for the latest Pentium 4 and Celeron processors as well as 1066 MHz FSB. Similarly, the PT894 supports DDR 266/333/400 as well as DDR2 400/533/667. The PT894 also supports a PCI-Express x16 graphics connection as well as two PCI-Express x1 connections to the North Bridge and two to the South Bridge.

VIA PT894 Pro Chipset

The VIA PT894 Pro is VIA's top of the line chipset aimed at the professional and high-end enthusiast segments. The PT894 Pro chipset is the first to offer dual PCI-Express graphics for Pentium 4 processors and supports the latest P4 and Celeron processors and 1066 MHz FSB. Similarly, the PT894 supports DDR 266/333/400 as well as DDR2 400/533/667. The PT894 Pro features VIA's DualGFX technology, allowing for two PCI-Express graphics cards. Additionally, there are two PCI-Express x1 connections to the South Bridge.

The PT894 Pro supports 20 lanes of PCI-Express graphics bandwidth through the North Bridge. There are three basic usage scenarios with a dual graphics setup. The first is the most obvious, using two cards together for 3D rendering on one display. In this case, the graphics cards would be in two PCI-E x8 slots. Other scenarios include one display for rendering and one for information or tools or even three or four displays where the primary graphics card would be in an x16 slot while the secondary card is in an x4 slot.

The PT894 Pro is completely capable of supporting dual graphics cards in an SLI-like configuration. The ability to use nVIDIA SLI cards with the PT894 Pro chipset is based strictly on business as the hardware is fully able to support SLI. From what I understand VIA is talking with both nVIDIA and ATI for dual graphics support. It will be interesting to see if and how ATI's dual graphics setup compares to nVIDIA's.

VIA VT8251 South Bridge

VIA's VT8251 South Bridge allows for two PCI-Express x1 connections, two integrated IDE interfaces (for four ATA133 drives), four SATA ports and SATAII support. The chip also features integrated V-RAID supporting RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5. Eight USB 2.0 ports, integrated 10/00 Ethernet, HD Audio, AC97 96K/20-bit 8 channel audio and Ultra V-Link are also supported.

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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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