X-bit labs

E3 Expo 2005: Hardware Innovation Behind the Gaming Fun (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 05/19/2005 | 09:18 PM ]

VIA: Inbetween License Wars

We have already got used to it I think, but VIA again was in the middle of licensing wars. If you have been following our News lately, then you should know all the details around the Pentium M bus license (see this story for details).

But this is not the only negotiation in progress. Since E3 is a gaming show, solutions for comfortable and pleasant game-play are the primary focus here. And certainly, cost-effective solutions for the mainstream users win quite a bit of attention. While ATI and NVIDIA keep advancing their dual-graphics card solutions and throw all their effort into this endless competition, VIA didn’t keep its hands in pockets as well. They already developed platforms for both of them. At the show they were demonstrating two running systems: for Intel and AMD platforms, of course. Both systems were working with dual graphics cards: one with two ATI cards, and another one with two NVIDIA cards. Let’s take a closer look at them.

The first system was built around the VIA PT880 Pro chipset and was equipped with two ATI graphics cards. Again, if you have been reading our News, you should remember something about the upcoming multi-VPU technology from ATI, which may be called CrossFire (see this News story for details about the trademark status). VIA claims that they will be offering a better value alternative to the upcoming ATI MVPU. According to VIA, any combination of a PCI Express and AGP 8x graphics cards will work just fine in a system with VIA PT880 Pro mainboard. This system will ideally support up to 4 monitors, and the newest chipset modifications will also support Intel dual-core processors, which means that they will be laid out taking into account the thermal and power requirements set by the new dual-core architecture from Intel. These chipsets are still going through validation process, but pretty soon VIA will be offering PT894 chipset with PCI Express support and its Pro version supporting dual PCI Express graphics cards.

VIA PT880 Pro based mainboard and two ATI graphics cards:
AGP + PCI Express

The other system displayed at VIA’s booth was the AMD Athlon 64 platform built around VIA K8T890 Pro chipset. It was equipped with the SLI graphics system built with two NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT based graphics cards.

VIA K8T890 Pro based mainboarde and NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT SLI

Of course, SLI is a very niche product, however, VIA believes that they could offer NVIDIA a good way of covering the mainstream and lower mainstream market segments as well. Right now the nForce4 mainboards are quite expensive, and combined with the price of the SLI kit, this brings us to the necessity to make a pretty significant investment. VIA claims that once they agree with NVIDIA they will be rolling out a much more affordable alternative for SLI. They will try to push the price of their “SLI” boards below the $120-limit, which is really attractive. They already have a few partners in their camp. Among them are ASUS, Gigabyte and a few second tier mainboard manufacturers.

So, I believe that during Computex I will be able to tell you more definite what’s going on with these platforms and how soon they are going to hit the streets in mass volume. Of course, we will do our best to offer you some detailed performance analysis by then, too :)

Well, E3 is about entertainment, and this includes not only gaming fun. Multimedia centers, advanced digital video, HDTV are also in focus of the hardware developers. VIA id going to have something for us here pretty soon. I am talking about the new chipset for media center and home entertainment type of systems – VIA K8M890, which should have quite a few improvements aimed at delivering high quality video and multimedia experience.