- A Look at the VIA K8T800 Chipset

Legion Hardware has their review of the VIA K8T800 up today. Bottom line....we need SMP support in games. For the time being, if you're a gamer, stick with your current setup. I would also recommend that you check out our own in-depth review of the K8T800.

I am finding it difficult deciding what I found most impressive about the test subjects. Was it the powerful Opteron 244 processors or the highly flexible K8T800 chipset or just the rock solid MSI K8T Master2-FAR motherboard? One thing is for sure they were all top of their game; the Opteron 244 processors were amazing. Clocked at just 1.8GHz they were able to rub shoulders with Pentium 4 processors that were over 1GHz faster. When operating in SMP under a program that supported this mode the Opteron's were unstoppable smashing through the 400fps barrier in Quake III Arena. Unfortunately, the vast majority of games out there do not offer SMP support and therefore a dual Opteron processor configuration is a waste for even the most inspired gamer. On the other hand a single Opteron processor clocked at 1.8GHz can offer similar performance to a gaming system running a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor.