VIA K8T800 Pro Chipset Preview

System Setup and Benchmarks

Our system setup for this series of benchmarks is consistent with all of our previous reviews on processors and platforms at PC Perspective.  The motherboard we used was a VIA reference board (pictured below).  There is really nothing spectacular on the board, about as plain as you can get a motherboard anymore.

Note that this is a Socket 940 pin motherboard, so our testing was restricted to the Athlon FX processors we have now.  It is a dual channel memory setup, where the memory channels alternate — DIMM1 is channel 1, DIMM2 is channel 2 — though I doubt this pattern will make it to any retail motherboard.  The chipset does support Socket 754 and you can expect to see boards with this chipset in all three pin counts: 754, 940 and 939. 

As our time with the motherboard was very short, our comparison here is limited to the original K8T800 chipset on the 940 pin Asus SK8V motherboard.

The benchmarks used were:

• SiSoft Sandra 2003 Max3! and 2004 SP1
• AIDA32
• Cachemem
• Quake III: Arena
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• X2: The Threat
• 3D Mark 2001: SE v330
• PC Mark 2002
• Business Winstone 2004
• Content Creation Winstone 2004
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• XMPEG / DivX Encoding
• WinRAR Compression
• SPECviewperf 7.1
• CineBench 2003
• ScienceMark 2.0 Beta