VIA K8T900 Chipset Launched For AMD Platform
MojoDog writes "
VIA has launched their new K8T900 chipset for the AMD platform this morning
and HotHardware.com has a full analysis with benchmarks of the new platform.
VIA is jumping into the dual PCI Express Graphics arena as well with this
offering with their 'Rapid Fire' technology, which currently only supports their
MultiChrome Dual GPU setups. However, NVIDIA and ATi will both
have to provide the required driver level support for either SLI or CrossFire
technology, which currently is not available on this new chipset. Beyond
that, from a features and performance standpoint the K8T900 looks to be a solid
solution."
Why you need a duel? Intel has publically accepted that their dual-core design is not optimal for dual core CPUs.
The real competetion for AMD will be probably released in the first quarter of 2006. Why on earth do you need a duel? To confirm something that even intel has (indirectly) confirmed?
Open source is not just about the source code itself (for hardware), it's just as much (if not more) about availability of documentation so that drivers may be written and maintained. OpenBSD has had several campaigns (as well as ongoing work behind the scenes) for releasing documentation to hardware, and this has been quite successfull. However, the Linux crowds support of this has been lackluster. What good is nice open source applications if you have no current hardware to run it on?
I have noticed alot of people complaining about Via chipsets whenever their name comes up but after trying out their competition I wonder how much this is warranted. I had used Via chipsets in my S754 based system (Asus K8V Deluxe) with no problem but I wanted to upgrade to a board with more SATA connecters so I purchased a Nvidia N4 based motherboard from MSI. I wanted the Nvidia chipset because of its firewall capabilities and it sounded like it had alot of nice features. Right away I found out that the Nvidia IDE driver was very problematic. I found quite a few forum posts where it was recommended that the IDE driver should not be installed. I also found out that installing the firewall/ethernet software would cause problems, something that is also not uncommon. I did many winxp reinstalls and I never did get the board to work correctly. I ended up getting a budget mb from Asrock (939 Dual SataII) with a ULI chipset and have not had a problem since.