SUMMARY: Over the past 18 months VIA Technology has been hindered by an on-going court case with Intel over Pentium 4 licensing rights. Just recently Intel settled their disagreements with VIA which has allowed both companies to get back to work. This week VIA released their new PT800 single channel, fully licensed, Pentium 4 chipset. Follow Shawn "Toxic" Baker as he tells us all about it and if it can keep pace with Intel's dual channel monsters, Canterwood and Springdale!
The PT800 is VIAs latest Northbridge for the Pentium 4 platform and is accompanied with the new VT8237 Southbridge which carries support for Parallel ATA 66/100/133 along with Serial ATA RAID which we will talk more about later.
We mentioned that VIA are aiming this chipset more as a budget chipset as the pricing per 1000 chips is a lot cheaper when compared to Intels latest chipsets. Current pricing on the 875 with ICH5R is $53 US and without ICH5R $50 US. While the 865 is priced slightly cheaper, the 865PE is $49 US, 865G is $45 US and 865P is $42 US. If VIA stick to their current pricing, the PT800 chipset will be priced under $30 US per 1000 chipsets for third party motherboard manufacturers, making it a lot more affordable for motherboard companies to produce. The cheaper chipset price, of course, carries over to the retail price of the motherboard which should be similar to P4X pricing.
Its also worth noting that other companies, like SIS, have to pay royalties per chipset to Intel which adds about $5 US per motherboard to the overall price of the product, VIA do not have to pay this as it was all part of the agreement after the closure of the court case.
Key Features
- Supports full range of Intelฎ Pentiumฎ 4 processors - Supports Hyper-Threading Technology - 800/533/400MHz FSB settings - Supports up to 8GB DDR400/333/266 SDRAM with ECC - Support for AGP 8X/4X - V-Link 533 MB/sec high bandwidth North/South Bridge interconnect - Support for VIA Vinyl Multichannel Audio Suite - Serial ATA support for up to 4 devices - Integrated V-RAID with RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, & JBOD (SATA) support - Parallel ATA133/100/66 support for up to 4 devices - Support for up to 8 USB 2.0/USB 1.1 ports, UHCI compliant - Integrated MC'97 Modem - Integrated 10/100 Fast Ethernet MAC - Advanced power management capabilities including ACPI/OnNow
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