X-bit labs

ASUS A7V880 Mainboard Review. First Look at VIA KT880 Chipset (page 3)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/19/2004 | 09:05 AM ]

However, even though this topic is not directly connected with the major goal of our today’s review, we have to stress that NVIDIA is about to introduce new South Bridges in the near future, which will allow nForce2 Ultra 400 to offer more attractive specifications than those of the today’s KT880. Within the next few weeks, they are planning to announce RAID MCP and Gigabit MCP, with the integrated SerialATA RAID controller and a Gigabit network controller with a hardware Firewall:

The new South Bridges from NVIDIA are due in June-May timeframe.

But even if NVIDIA keeps its promise and will not delay the launching of its new South Bridges, VIA KT880 will still have one very important advantage over the rival. It is the price. VIA chipsets for Socket A platform cost considerably less than the competing solutions from NVIDIA, which makes the VIA stuff much more popular. For instance, VIA KT880 mainboards will cost about the same as VIA KT600, which is about $10-20 less than NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 solutions cost.

In conclusion I would like to point out one more thing, which will be of interest to overclockers in the first place. Speaking about VIA KT880 as of VIA KT600 + dual-channel memory controller I left out one very important fact. Namely, I have to stress that VIA KT880 has finally acquired the so long-awaited option to clock the AGP/PCI buses asynchronously, which is also known as AGP lock. In other words, now when you want to increase the FSB frequency beyond the nominal values, such as 100/133/166/200MHz, you will also be able to avoid synchronous growth of the AGP and PCI frequencies together with the FSB one, so that they exceeded the nominal 33/66MHz. This way, now it will be much easier to overclock the processors on VIA KT880 based mainboards, because you will not need to keep an eye on the proper functioning of the AGP and PCI devices during overclocking. As a result, VIA KT880 will be at least no worse than NVIDIA nForce2 from the overclocking point of view, because the latter has had the option of asynchronous FSB and AGP/PCI buses clocking from the very beginning.