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- Date:
- Wednesday, September 29, 2004
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
VIA K8T890 Motherboard Chipsets
VIA brings PCI-Express to AMD's Athlon 64 platform. This technology preview gives a look at what this means to hardware enthusiast and gamers.
VIA K8T890 & K8T890Pro Features
The VIA K8T890 Features
Here is a look at the block diagram that represents the VIA K8T890 motherboard chipset combination along with a VT8251 southbridge.
What you see above is a lot of what you likely already know about in terms of overall features. In fact most of what is there is now considered commonplace when it comes to everyday motherboard support on enthusiast or top shelf products.
To whittle this down a bit, you can view it as below.
This represents to you what is really being showcased here; the dawning PCI-Express support for the AMD Athlon64 and new Sempron CPUs. Also a quick look at the chart will reveal that it supports dual Opteron configurations as well. Logic would state that this chipset would also be able to support upcoming dual core AMD processor configurations as well, but that is just a prediction on our part and not supported by official information.
What is different from current PCI-Express support that I have seen is the addition of two “extra” lanes off the southbridge. Notice that the VT8251 has two X1 PCI-Express lanes. These two additional lanes will give the K8T890 the ability to support a total of 7 separate PCI-Express devices where most we have seen have been limited to 5. The extra bandwidth provided by these new slots will certainly help in terms of newer bandwidth hungry applications as wide networking, HDTV, and high volume IO solutions such as RAIDed SATA or SCSI setups.
The VIA K8T890Pro Features
Of course this will be a chipset that is clearly pointed at computer hardware enthusiasts, hardcore gamers, and specialty application users. The centerpiece of the K8T890Pro is of course the VIA DualGFX support.
In a nutshell a couple of the X1 PCI-Express slots are sacrificed to make room for two physical X16 PCI-Express slots that can house video cards capable of being used in tandem for gaming performance, like NVIDIA’s SLI that we have reported on here. Do keep in mind that this VIA DualGFX chipset is likely to work with other solutions if/when we see them on the market.
You will notice above that the pysical slots from the northbridge out to the video cards will be X16 form factor. Since the northbridge can only support 20 physical lanes, two X16s is of course impossible. You will be able to use two X16 PCI-Express video cards, but they will not be accessing a bus that wide. What is yet to be known is how exactly the configuration will be laid out. Some have rumored it will be two X8 PCIE pathways, but it is very possible that configuration could negatively impact motherboard PCB costs due to having a need for a 6 layer board. Anyway, time will tell on the exact configuration.