As it is known, is now a dominant position in the segment of high-performance chipset platform under the Athlon 64 took NVIDIA products. This state of affairs has long been commonplace, and it seems as though self-evident. But it was not always so. Moreover, once long ago (by the standards of the history of computers) share NVIDIA chipsets on the market was not something that negligibly small, but not completely zero. I am about those times when NVIDIA has not yet produced a system logic chipsets. At that time a crucial role in advancing the AMD processors in the broadest segments of the population has played, strangely enough now to hear, the company VIA. And all began with the Slot A and KX133 chipset.


That is because the company has developed and VIA Over available processor chipset for AMD K7 architecture, these processors were able to achieve a "place in the sun" in the marketplace. In fact, at that time there was no other alternative. Corporate chipset from AMD roads was in production, did not differ performance and stability, and the company has not set itself the aim to take a significant share of the market chipsets. For obvious reasons, rely on the assistance largest producer of chipsets, the Intel is not accounted for, another developer sets of system logic - SiS, as usual zapazdyval withdrawal of the products in the mass market because of production problems. In this situation, the company VIA was simply doomed to success. What she did.

Currently, high-performance segment of chipsets for AMD 64 platform densely occupied NVIDIA company, but did not think VIA and surrender, and quite seriously intends to achieve a piece of "sweet cake".

K8T900 is very similar to its predecessor - K8T890Pro. In fact, the new chipset is only 8x support regime for each of the PCI-E slots. Details of the characteristics used technology and the results of some tests you can see in our theoretical material on the VIA C7-M, K8T900, S3 Chrome20.

Motherboard
Since we got an engineering sample, not serial product, there is no point to dwell on the set and the appearance of the motherboard. In mass-produced products, which might look a bit different.

But there is no deserving attention. This availability switch operation PCI-E tires, situated between PCI Express slots. As you can see, the decision applied very similar to what uses NVIDIA.

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I specifically do not include a photo with the BIOS settings. Motherboard BIOS settings tested with a default. No optimizations specifically has been done. Sam BIOS is not anything special. All necessary "thin" settings such as adjustable memory timings, frequencies of all tires, etc. proceed. While the opportunity to disperse e BIOS is present, the dispersal of this motherboard, we are not checked. First, the maximum frequency of 240 MHz FSB now looks more times than modestly, on the other hand, the main objective of the engineering prototype - to demonstrate stable operation, staffing regimes. With regard to the maximum FSB, motherboard manufacturers certainly "porabotayut" on this, as well as the inclusion of the BIOS of each of them branded technologies. And we were able to test the performance of the motherboard so to speak "without embellishment."

The results seem quite logical. NVIDIA keeps palm championship in almost all tests, as set leader. However, productivity K8T900 closely approaching nForce4 SLI-and even more so - is less memory latency, which in itself is interesting. To see the advantage in performance chipset for 3D applications rather difficult, but here VIA K8T900 still manages to forward it to 3DMark'03.

But synthetics synthetics, and now see how things with productivity in real applications.