X-bit labs

ASUS Denies VIA K8T890 Mainboard Cancellation.

Category: Mainboards

by Anton Shilov

[ 12/07/2004 | 06:31 AM ]

Both VIA Technologies, a leading chipset maker, and ASUSTeK Computer, a top maker of mainboards, said Monday ASUS would release its mainboards based on VIA K8T890 core-logic shortly, denying a report about cancellation of the mainboard by ASUSTeK Computer.

The mainboard manufacturer claimed there was a misunderstanding about cancellation of the plans to use the VIA K8T890 core-logic, reports Hard Tecs 4U web-site, and had only planned to stop sending its A8V-E Deluxe to reviewers because of lower than expected performance that was a consequence of faulty BIOS version. A VIA representative called the information “completely untrue” and assured X-bit labs the company has strong relations with ASUSTeK.

VIA Technologies, the world’s No. 2 maker of chipsets, formally announced its VIA K8T890 chipset in late September. Neither then, nor now, the chipset’s performance and market availability are clear. The K8T890 chipset supports AMD Athlon 64, AMD Sempron and AMD Opteron processors in various form-factors, including chips with 800MHz and 1000MHz HyperTransport bus. The main peculiarity of VIA’s latest chipset is support for a PCI Express x16 lane for graphics cards and support for 4 PCI Express x1 lanes for other kinds of add-in cards by the North Bridge. VIA’s K8T890 can operate with outdated VT8237 I/O controller, or yet-to-be-launched VT8251 South Bridge.

VIA, who has been traditionally leading chipset market of AMD processors, currently pins a lot of hope on AMD64 market because of higher margins. It is now unclear when mainboards based on VIA K8T890 are expected to emerge in retail. Mainboards with PCI Express and designed for AMD64 chips based on NVIDIA’s nForce4 and ATI’s RADEON XPRESS 200 are expected to be available commercially in December, 2004, or January, 2005. Typically VIA tends to be the first, or in-line with other chipset designers, with its products that offer certain innovative functionality.