VIA PT Series: VIA PCI Express for Intel
by Wesley Fink on January 31, 2005 12:01 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
VIA PT894 Reference Board
Reference Boards are designed for chipset qualification, so they are not designed for case mounting and they often have abbreviated features.
VIA sent us an upper-end board based on the 894 northbridge with the current 8237 southbridge. We had planned to test on-board audio, Ethernet, and SATA, but the Reference Board was equipped with the older 8237 controller (the 8251 is not yet available), no gigabit Ethernet (the PCIe VIA chip was not ready), and basic AC'97 audio instead of the HD audio that will be part of shipping 894/894 Pro boards. This is not really that unusual with Reference boards, so you should not try to read too much into the fact that the 894 Reference Board was stripped compared to production boards. In addition, the 1066 FSB was not yet working, but VIA tells us that it will be fully functioning in production chipsets. The 800FSB was working as expected and all tests were run at 800FSB.
| VIA PT894 Reference Board Specifications | |
| CPU Interface | Intel Socket 775 |
| Chipset | VIA PT894 Northbridge - VIA VT8237 Southbridge |
| Bus Speeds | 200MHz to 232MHz in 1MHz Increments |
| PCI/AGP | 66/33, 75.4/37.7, 88/44, PLL1, Pll2 |
| CPU/PCIe | Synch/Asynch |
| Core Voltage | Default, +0.025V to +0.175V in .025V increments |
| CPU Clock Multiplier | Fixed (Intel) |
| FSB | 800, 1066 |
| DRAM Voltage | 2.50V to 2.80V in 0.1V increments |
| Memory Slots | Four 184-pin DDR DIMM Slots Dual-Channel Configuration Regular Unbuffered Memory to 4GB Total |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x16 PCIe 1 x1 PCIe 2 PCI Slots |
| Onboard SATA/SATA RAID | 2 SATA Drives by VT8237 (RAID 0, 1, JBOD) |
| Onboard IDE/IDE RAID | Two Standard ATA133/100/66 (4 drives) |
| Onboard USB 2.0/IEEE-1394 | 8 USB 2.0 ports supported by VT8237 No Firewire |
| Onboard LAN | Wireless Ethernet 802.11g by VIA VT6655 |
| Onboard Audio | AC '97 2.3 8-Channel by VIA VT1617A |
| BIOS Revision | Award Beta 1/14/2005 |
The basic tweaking and overclocking controls were present on the board, so we were able to do some basic testing of locks and overclocking. This was a pleasant surprise for a Reference Board, since there are often insufficient options to really test locks and overclocking potential.
We confirmed that the PCI/AGP lock and the PCIe Lock were working properly by fixing the PCI/AGP bus at 66/33 and the PCIe bus at 100 - then overclocking the CPU to the highest 232 setting (FSB 928) available in BIOS. In a floating or non-working PCI/AGP lock, most boards will fail at around 217 to 218 CPU setting. With the Reference board, we had no problem at all running at the 232 setting. We confirmed the fixed PCI with a PCI Geiger card in a PCI slot. It also appears that the PCIe can be locked at 100, a large improvement over the floating PCIe frequency in Intel chipsets, which can limit overclocking.
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indianguy - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
I may be wrong about hard disk bottleneck but these north bridges wont make it big anyway . Nforce 5 for intel pentium 4 for is about to be released soon and it wont be a paper launch like this one. It will kick ass of all other pentium chipsets. See the case of KT890 and nforce 4. Via made so much noise about being first for AMD cpu , but never made it while nforce 4 is everywhere.At the same time , i should also say that these north bridges made great choice for people upgrading old computers like socket 478 , williamette and northwood . I still have one old pentium 3 with via cle 266 chipset in biostar motherboard, where Via gave a new lease of life to my old pentium 3. But apart from that i wont use or reccomend anyone buying Via.
Cygni - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
little to now = little to noCygni - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
I dont agree at all that hard disc performance is whats holding back PC performance. Maybe for read/write heavy apps... but for gaming and general use, HD is hardly the problem, imho. Users these days have gobs of RAM which keeps frequent disc access way down.And theres lots of evidence that HD's arent the bottleneck in gaming. Moving from an ATA 133 drive to a SATA 150 drive barely gives any boost at all. Even moving from ATA 100 to SATA 150 shows little boost at all. Same with using Raptors, little to now increase in FPS. Loading times? Yup. Install times? Deffinitly... but overall performance? I just cant agree.
indianguy - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
This is just a paper launch. Hard disc performance is the main bottleneck nowadays in PC performance. Anyone buying motherboard today without NCQ and sata 2 will be very foolish. Until the 8251 (or 8239) southbridge from via comes , these northbridges wont do any good. Better buy a nforce 4 with sata 2 and sata 2 capable drive from hitachi rather than waste money in these obsolete south bridges and ultra v interconnects from via. By the time 8251 south bridge is actually released by via , next gen of 945/955 chipsets with sata 2/ncq will actually be released by intel making these chipsets only sold by no name mothorboard makers who sell only on price not features . Via makes big noise with no actual performace or product availability . No wonder its running knee deep in losses all these years .Wesley Fink - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
#19 - We carried the overclocking as far as we could with the somewhat limited options available on the Reference board. The overclocking results are at the bottom of page 6.Googer - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
#18 we all know the odd are in favor of AMD winning that battle. 10-1.Azsen - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Have you tried to overclock these boards, see what they are capable of?Dualboy24 - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Well I hope this will help push the 775 boards into a reasonable price range with the support for AGP and PCI-E. This may increase the number of buyers for this platform... but right now I assume most enthusiasts are goinng AMD for the performance and the charts on the review do show why.Looking forward to the next big clash of the titans.... Dual Cores anyone?
Regs - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Wow would I love to see this for the AMD CPU's as well. It will dramatically help PCI-Express melt in to the market.Cygni - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Impressive stuff from VIA. Should do wonders for their marketshare in the P4 market, im thinking. VIA is already doing quite well in S939 with the K8T800Pro, but its going to lose some when NF4 hits in force.