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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."
The Tech Report has a more thorough review of the chipset, complete with independent benchmarks.
With the cross-licensing agreements with Intel, will VIA be prohibited from transitioning these technologies into their chipsets for the AMD platform?
I'm no expert, but the nForce4 chipset seems to give AMD owners just about everything they need anyway.
I could be missing something of course. The VIA article was so full of abbreviations and marketing diagrams I had problems concentrating on what the real news were.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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.
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
The infamous bug with nvidia was due to nvidias cards not being AGP 2.0 standards compliant in terms of watt usage. Via blamed Nvidia and Nvidia blamed VIA. Intel owned 95% of the market then and Nvidia only tested the geforce with Intel boards. People assumed VIA was just unstable compared to Intel as a result and some still believe it today.
Vendors like Dell and IBM stuck with Intel as a result.
Also there was a scam 4 years ago when the athlon boards including defective capacitators that would explode. Most cheaper motherboard makers prefered VIA/AMD solutions due to the cheaper price, also picked the bad capitators. Consumers assumed it was VIAs fault stuck with Intel. A few them made it into Intel boards too including IBM's desktop line but the press was not big to pick that up.
Finally in 2005 many business users are seeing through the BS of the early days and VIA is fine.
VIA is not that bad anymore and nvidia works fine with their boards now.
http://saveie6.com/
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...