X-bit labs

VIA’s K8T900 – "Promising", Web-Sites Say

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/28/2005 | 04:23 PM ]

Several web-sites around the Internet have managed to get the latest K8T900 chipset product from VIA Technologies, the struggling chipset maker, for a review. Except of the fact that the core-logic is at least year late compared to NVIDIA’s nForce4 SLI, the media positively considered the new part from the company that used to be the No.1 supplier of chipsets in the world.

“Synthetic testing favored the nForce 4 SLI based test bed, topping the VIA K8T900 set up in both memory and CPU testing with PCMark05.  However, when we started more specific tests, more often than not, the K8T900 held the upper hand over the nForce 4 by the slightest of margins.  These leads were very close and in most cases should be interpreted as a tie.  This shows the K8T900 brings comparable performance to that of the market leading nForce 4,” VIA K8T900 review by HotHardware web-site claims.

“Our quick first look at the K8T900 is promising. VIA’s new chipset largely keeps up with the nForce4 SLI, and it might gain some ground once VIA completes its SATA drivers with NCQ support,” says TechReport web-site.

VIA K8T900 chip supports AMD Athlon 64-series processors with 1GHz HyperTransport bus, PCI Express x16 lane for graphics that can be split between two graphics cards when operating in multi-GPU mode, PCI Express x4 lane for add-in cards, such as network adapters. VIA said that its subsidiary’s S3 Graphics’ Chrome S27 graphics processors would be able to run in tandem on VIA K8T900 core-logic-based mainboards engaging multi-GPU technology called MultiChrome.

• HotHardware: VIA’s K8T900 Chipset.
• TechReport: VIA’s K8T900 Chipset.