Introduction

We saw the release of the Opteron processor earlier this year which was powered by AMD's own 8131 Northbridge. With many months passed since and a lot of R&D invested, it was time to see what VIA were capable of when given the latest 64-bit processor to play with from AMD. The latest chipset to hit the market from the Taiwanese chipset manufacturer comes in the shape of the K8T800 and carries over everything you need when it comes to inserting those brand new processors into VIA-powered motherboards.

The K8T800 chipset carries over with it the latest Southbridge from VIA, the VT8237, which we were very impressed with when reviewing the PT800 only last month. It carries over the same features which we will look more into later on.

Due to the limitation in server hardware and server benchmarking software, we have chosen to write a preview on the chipset with a lot of benchmarks with different processor environments. We will help give people an understanding of the technology and the future it has.

Without dragging on anymore, let's see what VIA's K8T800 chipset is capable of when powered with some of the newest and most powerful processors to hit the market from Advanced Micro Devices.