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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".
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
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.
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 infamous bug
"The" infamous bug? Believe me, it takes more than one infamous bug to gain a well-deserved reputation as a purveyor of crap.
I hit the one with the Soundblaster 128 + Via motherboard. Turns out Via's PCI was shit, and while the Soundblaster 128 did happen to really whale on the particular way in which it was shit, you could randomly lock the system up (completely unstoppably) with any high PCI load.
Mind you, this isn't their first PCI chipset. PCI had been out for years; we were just starting to see computers coming out that had no ISA connectors at all.
That motherboard, as I recall, also had memory issues.
Almost everything I've owned has been Via because I've been a poor college student or worse, and almost everything I've owned has been crap, except the Asus based computer I have. I bought this cheap laptop with a damned Via chipset, and it is the only laptop (even in the cheap-ass class) that runs so hot it burns you when it is idling. Yup, it's the chipset. I wish to high heaven I could replace it.
"Not Via", after extensive experience, is now my #1 criterion when buying new computers. I don't even care if they've improved; they screwed up so many times over such a long period of time in such stupid ways that it has to be systematic; unless they restructured if they've been "good lately" it's either luck, or simply that you haven't heard of the errors their stuff has yet.