X-bit labs

Chaintech Prepares Mainboard with AGP 8x and PCI Express x16.

Category: Mainboards

by Anton Shilov

[ 02/10/2004 | 08:37 PM ]

A mainboard maker is readying a mainboard based on VIT PT890 chipset with two totally different slots for graphics cards – AGP 8x and PCI Express x16, unofficial sources said. The introduction of this product will bring an interesting option for some end-users and system integrators.

As it transpired recently, VIA’s PT890 North Bridge not only supports upcoming PCI Express x16 slots for graphics cards, but also sports AGP 8x bus that may be treated as a bit outdated, but that still provides enough bandwidth for the vast majority of graphics cards available nowadays.

Despite of indisputable advantage availability of both PEG x16 and AGP connectors on the same mainboard provides, there are numerous of doubts that such solution is really essential and attractive for end-users.

Chaintech’s SPT890 mainboard is based on VIA PT890+VT8237 core-logic and may be considered as a pretty conservative solution aimed to work mostly with today’s add-in boards rather than to handle loads of innovative solutions. The platform will work with 478-pin Intel processors featuring 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, will have 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of dual-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, will offer 4 PCI slots and 1 PCI Express x4 slot along with other important features, such as Serial ATA-150 connectors, USB 2.0 and so on.

The mainboard will be a part of Chaintech’s next-generations Summit family, thus, will be pretty affordable.