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VIA's New PT Chipsets
TheTechLounge writes "Today VIA is announcing their new PT series of chipsets to the masses. The chipsets that make up the PT series represent the first real alternatives to Intel's chipsets for the Pentium 4 platform and aim to ease the transition to PCI-Express and DDR-II. All of VIA's PT products are covered under a ten-year cross license agreement between VIA and Intel. As expected, the majority of motherboard manufacturers will be using the PT chipsets in upcoming boards. Some of these companies include Abit, Asus, Chaintech, Biostar, DFI, EPoX, Gigabyte, MSI and Soltek. The PT chipsets cover a wide range of PCI-Express, AGP and IGP solutions for the Intel platform. VIA's new PT chipsets include the PT880 Pro, the PT894 and the PT894 Pro."
As for pricing, the PT880 Pro will be priced competitively with the current Intel 865 solutions on the market while the PT894 will be priced to compete with the current Intel 915 boards and the PT894 Pro competing with 915/925 boards.
The fact that they don't mention price until the end and in such a lackluster way it makes it tough for me to get excited about this. I really would like to see a less expensive alternative to Intel, not just "priced competitively".
Plus, the fact that the benchmarks don't show anything too exciting doesn't help either.
But competition is always a good thing, I just wish the only selling point didn't seem like "We aren't Intel".
...i'm not buying any of them until they clean up their act and make them linux-friendly.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Just what I always wanted, totally new chipsets with totally new incompatibilites, bugs, and other weirdnesses. What do you want to bet that it takes them one or two firmware revisions to make them work with some major video card vendor's product or another, or that they'll only boot with the pentium chips out now, and you'll have to somehow borrow a processor to flash an updated bios with any new processor IDs that come out say the week after you got the motherboard?
There was a slashdot article about Intel buying licensing from Nvidia so they could produce SLI motherboards. Looks like VIA isnt waiting around.
I thought this year might be void of some good hardware, but a dual core Intel board with sli might be be real in Q205. Nice.
With the cross-licensing agreements with Intel, will VIA be prohibited from transitioning these technologies into their chipsets for the AMD platform?
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Can i expect the system to not power on if I have a SCSI card and a PS/2 mouse hooked up like in the last system I had with a VIA chipset? Or have they at long last started making products that work?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
At least now that Intel has gotten over that whole RAMBUS stupidity.
Intel chip sets tend to be very stable. I have to admit that for a server I was thinking of building I am thinking very hard about an Intel motherboard with an Intel CPU. Unless the VIA is faster or cheaper what is the benefit?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The Tech Report has a more thorough review of the chipset, complete with independent benchmarks.
I wonder - and I'm not being facetious or sarcastic - is there really much of a market left for this sort of a thing?
Intel has, sadly, been having its own ass handed to it in the high-performance/gaming segment for a year or more, now. No gaming enthusiast with the slightest bit of hardware knowledge, which is apparently the PT's target market, owns a P4 system these days.
Unless this PT chipset is designed to cut costs for resellers like Dell and Gateway with their high-end machines (and I use the term loosely), I don't see it having any impact at all.
mayby it just Cruises along!
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
I read another article about the PT's linked on the homepage of the El Reg website.. I don't remember the article mentioning much about it's advantages/disadvantages compared to the P4 or Athlon line of processors.
I do recall the VIA chipsets running at much cooler temperatures than it's competitors. Perhaps they are on to something. With everyone jumping onto the SFF bandwagon, their chips could prove to be quite befitting in that area. I myself wouldn't mind seeing a 2 GHz processor that doesn't need a bohemoth of a heatsink to keep it cool.
It'd be interesting to see how the temperatures compare to the Pentium-M line.
Both Via and Intel do a fairly good job of being linux friendly.
They open up specs for their on-board video stuff, sound, and network drivers.
(the intel gigabyte ethernet cards are top of the line and the PXE support makes them great cluster nics.)
Much better support then what you get from Nvidia or ATI (Nvidia closed source drivers nice, but they are still closed. Also their support for motherboards were especially subpar... until the kernel developers when thru the huge pain of reverse engineering them.)
If you don't need the 3d power a i915 chipset should be very nice for a regular desktop, and Via's Mini-itx are nicely supported and their "
"padlock" hardware-based random number generator can make VPN's that are faster then the fastest Pentium 4 or Opteron proccessor. Also their mpeg2 decoder makes the mini-itx suitable for a mythtv frontend dispite it's slow CPU.
All in all Via and Intel do a decent job.
Just avoid CHEAP Via motherboards and you do great. Get the nicer Asus (don't waste your money on the 'enthusiests' boards) stuff and it's rock stable.
some nice Unix-building advice:
http://cr.yp.to/hardware/advice.html
Build a GREAT box for less then 700 bucks. It's suprising how high-quality stuff has gotten cheap.. as long as you know what to look for.
until hitting something in its massive blindspot.
PT's suck
VIA's AMD-based chipsets are among the most Linux-friendly chipsets you'll find. In fact, they're far more Linux-friendly than nForce chipsets. Why should their Intel-based chipsets be any different?
The next machine I build will have a K8T800 Pro-based mobo, as I trust VIA to make a Linux-friendly chipset more than anyone else.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Doesn't anyone at VIA stop and think for a second before deciding on some name for a new product? I own a Taurus PT911 semi-automatic pistol for personal protection and in that particular case the name is kind of cool because I get to joke about pitying the fool who dares attack me, not having to call 911 and stuff, but to name a chipset PT is just lame. Chrysler is no better with their Chrysler PT Cruiser. Imagine some guy asking a girl: "Hey, wanna go for a ride in my pity cruiser?" What were they thinking?
Here are some more sites covering it... all about the same content, really:
viperlair.com
hardocp.com
techreport.com
thetechzone.com
tweaktown.com
thetechzone.com
hothardware.com
hexus.net
pcper.com
legionhardware.com
thetechlounge.com
bigbruin.com
I have no idea what IGP is, and I consider myself to be fairly well-informed as far as parts and new technologies go (que up all the elitist and fanboi jokes).
Honestly, I DID do a search on IGP: you can find it here: http://www.google.com/search?&q=define%3Aigp. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say, "Please stop assuming everyone in the world knows what the latest acronym du'jour stands for!"
-theGreater.
PS: After doing some addtional subtractive googles, it means "Integrated Graphics ()Processor(?)"
VIA couldn't even get PCI working right.
Now you can have PCI lockups and DMA errors many times faster with VIA PCI Express!
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Yukky!! Eww! Every experience I've had with VIA chipsets has been pretty bad... interrupt sharing especially...
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/31/1 654235
I second that. Had some trouble with some older VIA AMD chipsets and since then never bought VIA again. In particular on the board for my first Athlon the Realtime Clock would jump back and forth under load (under linux that is).
There was a patch that workarounded it but that one broke other things (like NFS support, USB support and other stuff that depends on timing).
I'll stay away from VIA for my linux boxes unless I come across a board that has been timetested long enough under linux to be trusted.
The last few Via chipset motherboards I have had, have had deadlock issues with the IDE bus. Capturing live video at mpeg2 speeds would cause a random lockup that required a hard reset to resolve.
When trying to figure out why, I ended up trying a third party (DFI) IDE board to see if that would resolve the issue. It did not, which suggests that the problem is actually with something at the motherboard on the Via Chipset. I ultimately decided to move to NForce2 boards for my video work.
I would hop that these issues have been addressed with the new Via chipsets, but I think it would be worthwhile to run some extended testing before you can't return any board with the chipset on it.
-Rusty
You never know...
It didn't mention anything in the review - will it support RAID on multiple drives off a single port multiplier? Where are these port multipliers likely to be found, affixed to the case's drive cage?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Consindering how nForce 4 Ultra is nothing more than crippled nForce 4 SLI/Pro, and NVIDIA rip-off motherboard makers $20-50 more just to put the logo on the product, you can expect VIA will try to put the same hardware scams.
I've had problems with a number of VIA chipset based systems. Enough so that unless I had substantial proof that there were major benefits to be had in using them and that I had people I trusted telling me the systems built around them were as stable as the Intel platform I'd steer clear of VIA.
I've said it before: I will never ever buy anything from VIA ever again.
on the dreaded KT133A chipset which could never be stabilized, after burning through two such boards, and constantly having locks and IDE problems, I went for the a much cheaper SiS based board and suddenly that was the first Athlon board I ever owned which ran totally stable. (and still does after almost four years and 3 processor upgrades)
Via is a no buy criterion for me everytime I see something from Via I try too look for other options. Last time that was, was a few weeks ago, when I ditched my long term plans of waiting for Via to bring out a decent C3 combo and went for a Mac Mini purchase for my silent server needs.
Their Intel chipset business has been very bad from a profit perspective for a long time while their small form factor Epia line has been doing quite well and has been a bright spot of cooperation between FOSS software and a major hardware producer. The problem is that the latter is a tiny fraction of the former in terms of revenues because everything is marketed in terms of gaming performance these days despite the fact that a huge segment of PC users don't play cutting edge games.
At least in part, the parent company is at fault here. While Epia systems could be far more successful, they get minimal marketing support at best.
I went into a store that had a giant Epia billboard prominently displayed at the entrance and asked to see the display models. There were none. The sales drones didn't even know what it was. Finally a manger told me I could special order one if I knew the model number, but he couldn't tell me the price. Whoa, way to go there.
It would make more sense if they split the two divisions into separate companies altoghter. The strategy of simultaneously suing Intel and then licensing their technology doesn't sound too promsing for the long run.
I didn't think I was distracted, but when I read the the first sentence of this posting as "The VatIcAn is announcing their new PT series of chip sets at the masses."
I thought for a moment that the Pope might be giving some competition to the unholy trinity of Gates, Barret, and Dell.
Oh well, maybe after some white smoke clears...
There's better coverage on Anandtech.
Well, in a way, you _do_ get the most important part of the motherboard directly on the Athlon 64.
And historically, the biggest reason for performance differences and various other issues on motherboards, has been the memory controller. That's for example what used to make Intel's chipsets rock, and Via's suck, or why the NForce 2 quickly became _the_ choice for Athlon XP chipsets.
Now that AMD has moved that on the CPU itself, you'll notice that in all benchmarks all motherboards perform the same. (1-2% differences are within the normal margin of error. Even running the same benchmark on the same computer again will occasionally deviate more than that.)
Sure, some might have some gizmo proprietary bus for the south bridge, or a different brand of software RAID drivers, or whatever. But in the end none of those make a real difference.
I.e., (A) AMD doesn't really need to get into that market any more, and (B) it makes no economic sense for them to. When they can get more money for the lowest end Sempron than a whole motherboard costs (bearing in mind that the north- and south-bridge are only a fraction of that cost), it makes no sense for them to use their limited fab space on making north- and south-bridges.
Or to put it otherwise, Athlon 64 market has just become a commodity market. It's several perfectly interchangeable chips, none of them really better than the competitors' offering. Which drives prices down. As they say, "the way to make a small fortune in the commodities market, is to start with a large fortune." There is no reason for AMD to compete in that market.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.