Via Pentium 4 chipsets show Eastern promise

VIA LAUNCHED THREE new chipsets today, the PT880Pro, PT894 and PT894Pro, all for Intel P4 platforms. These chips, while not setting the world on fire, should fill a badly needed niche in the Intel space. I expect them to be solid performers with a few very nice features for a low price.

The PT880Pro is a transition chip, a low end board that won't steal many people looking to buy an Nforce4 SLI board. It will sell a lot of boards to people looking to upgrade from an older i865 system to a newer board with more features in an orderly fashion.

It supports DDR at 266-400MHz and DDR2 at 400-667, a 1066FSB and PCIe graphics. To make things interesting, it also throws in AGP. Now, I will be the first to point out that the PCIe is not a full 16x, but you probably won't notice the difference, I have yet to see a benchmark that caps out 4x, so you will probably be fine. Remember, this is not a high end gaming board, but a step-up solution.

The benchmarks that VIA was showing with a Radeon 9800Pro show it a little ahead of the i865PE chipset, and a little behind the i915P with an X800XT. The take home message is that you can do what you want, with the parts you want, at a reasonable price and performance. Not bad.

The next chip, the VIA PT894 is the middle ground solution. It has the same RAM abilities as the KT880Pro, including DDR2-667, but lacks the AGP port. Instead, it has a full PCIe 16x port on the northbridge, and two more low latency 1x ports beside it. This is the mainstream part that goes head to head with the i915, but it also supports the 1066FSB for the three of you out there with chips that will run that fast.

The PT894Pro adds a second PCIe graphics slot, and you can run them in either 16x + 4x or 8x + 8x configurations. The Pro is otherwise the same as the non-Pro version, and has all the same goodies. The benchmarks shown to us at the launch were similar to the PT880Pro, some were ahead of it's Intel counterpart, others a little behind, but nothing glaring in either case. Call it about a performance wash from the numbers I saw, but look for a full review if .5% means a lot to you.

All of the above northbridges connect to the VT8251 southbridge. This new chip connects to the northbridges through the Ultra V-Link interface, a 1066MBps channel. This allows VIA to put a few goodies on the southbridge that you probably would not expect to see there, starting with another two PCIe 1x slots. Add in 2 PATA, 4 SATA II channels, RAIDable, and 8 USB2.0 ports so you have the basics covered. High definition audio and 10/100 ethernet round it out.

Lets start with the bad first, there is no gigabit Ethernet. While I know there are precious few things that support it, and fewer still that need it, it is nice to have. I think this is a pretty glaring omission, but nothing you can't fix with a Broadcom chip slapped on the mobo for a few dollars more.

The RAID is the usual 0, 1, 10 and JBOD with the promise of RAID 5 in the very near future. It also supports cross controller RAID, spare disk support and morphing of RAID levels. The V-RAID solution is pretty comprehensive for those that want to get their feet wet in the wild and wacky world of multiple drives.

One really nice addition is a feature that pretty much no one knows about, SATA port multipliers. Most people think the SATA spec is point to point, IE one port = one drive. That is mostly right, but there is a spec for a device called a port multiplier, which goes from one port to more than one. Every IDF they have a dozen or two vendors showing them off, but you almost never see them in the real world. Hopefully cheap widespread support like the VIA SATA II ports will hasten their entry into the inexpensive world of consumer level products. Either way, if you can find one, the VT8251 will allow you to use up to 60 drives at once. That should be enough for most.

The next toy on the southbridge is the Vinyl Audio Suite. This is a sound chip (duh) that supports up to 7.1 channels with 24/96 resolution. That is pretty much the standard now after Intel raised the bar with the i915/925, and VIA is right there with them. The nice thing that the 8251 adds is QSound support, that should please quite a few gamers.

Looking over the architecture, there are a few things that stand out. DDR2-667 and 1066FSB are things that mainstream Intel parts won't have until mid-year, so in this case VIA is ahead by a couple of quarters. The other interesting one is that the PT880 can do both AGP and PCIe graphics at the same time. It was up and running last weekend, and I saw no problems with it in the time I had. As the picture below shows, it even managed to do an accelerated window across the cards, something that I have yet to figure out how to do on a single card with my 9800Pro.

The down side to this multi-monitor madness is there will be no SLI. NVidia has set a pretty high bar, both technically and financially for SLI functionality, and for some reason they don't consider VIA to be one of the beautiful people. I am told that early versions of Forceware supported VIA chipsets in SLI mode, so I guess it would be a marketing reason for the lack of SLI. Either way, you can have four monitors running at the same time, so for the professional, it is just as good.

The PT series chips will do wonders for the Intel market. The new tech they bring to bear is the most minor part of it, the real gains are in the flexibility. It will come as a surprise to no one that DDR2 and PCIe have not set the world on fire. LGA775 is not bad in any way, but it kills the upgrade path if you have a nice CPU. Intel has not been very flexible with anything that would be considered an upgrade, it is a take it or leave it scenario.

Mobo makers are fuming, off the record of course, because the chips that they are selling, i865/875s are becoming scarce quickly, insert your favorite conspiracy theory here. From what I am told, they tie the number of the 'good' i865/875 chips to the number of i915/925 chips you sell. That would not be a problem if the 9xx chips sold well. They don't.

The other half of the rather moribund sales scenario is that DDR2 is a pig, a slow, expensive pig that no one wants in their back yard. RAM vendors tell me that OEMs are really the only ones buying DDR2, and by that I mean Dell, the rest are sitting on the fence at best. Sales, especially aftermarket sales numbers, are rather grim.

Enter VIA who has no agenda to force the market to. You want DDR, no problem, DDR2, we can do that also. AGP float your boat? Sure. Mix and match? Yup, we can help you out. Do what you want, we can facilitate it. If history is any guide, they will also be cheaper, but I have not seen pricing.

I think the PT series chips will be a big hit among the mobo makers. It finally gives them the breathing room that Intel chips did not, and saves them a few dollars while doing it. I can see them jumping for joy when the first shipments come in. Users will win through flexibility and a, up till now lacking, upgrade path while also saving a few dollars.

Short of a showstopper bug or abysmal performance, neither of which I saw during my hands on, or have heard of since, I think the PT880/894 series chips will do just fine. The P4 market has needed this for a long time. µ