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."

Comments

The Tech Report has real numbers

[EconolineCrush]

The Tech Report has a more thorough review of the chipset, complete with independent benchmarks.

Re:Yay new chipsets!

[Billly Gates]

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.