Conclusions

Analysis

I know that most of those benchmarks seemed pretty boring…all the bar graphs lining up with each other… But what we are seeing here with this article is really more a technology demonstration than any kind of performance enhancing product.  VIA took their K8T800 Pro chipset, that performs very well comapred to the competition, and added PCI Express support to it.  There was no other tweaking or chipset enhancements done that we were told about, or found in our testing.  If we were to see any change in the performance of the chipset compared to the past versions, it would have come through the PCI Express itself. 

The problem is, and has been, is showing how that added bandwidth that the PCIe bus provides is useful in current day games and applications. 

In nearly all the tests we saw, the K8T890 was either just slightly slower than the retail K8T800 Pro board from MSI or right with it.  Some of you may be thinking that VIA has done a poor job on the chipset as it is actually slower than the past generation, but in reality that is not the case.  MSI spends lots of time and enginneering making sure their retail motherboard and bios is tweaked to the fullest so that reviewers and enthusiasts get every inch of performance out of it they can.  These VIA reference boards on the other hand were the first off the assembly line often with hand modifications, as you saw in our images.  These boards are produced in order to make sure the technology in them works and is on par with what they expect.  It’s really the work of guys like Asus, Abit and MSI who are in the position to stretch and push these reference boards beyond their limits.

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Because of this, the very small deficits we see with the K8T890 reference board are more than acceptable at this stage.  When the retail boards hit the street, we’ll of course test again to see how performance improves.

One benchmark I feel needs its own addressing here is the analysis is Doom 3.  If any test in the suite was going to show benefits of PCI Express, it was going to be this game.  Doom 3 in Ultra Quality mode uses uncompressed textures that need to be swapped between the graphics memory and the main system memory at very fast speeds.  I was glad to see that the K8T890 board, even in its un-tweaked version, was able to win all of the Ultra Quality mode tests as well as some of the High and Medium Quality runs.  Of course we have to reiterate that the differences in speed were not very large, 1.6% at 16×12 4xAA for example, but those should increase on retail boards by at least another small margin. 

I am working on getting even more tests to stress the PCIe bandwidth limits such as HDTV editing and multitasking graphics in some way.  In truth though, like we mentioned in our first look at PCIe in June, it will be some time before the full benefits of PCIe are passed to end users.

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Another issue people will bring up, including NVIDIA, will be SLI support on the VIA chipsets.  This whole scenario is kind of putting me off, as neither company is really looking out for the end user with their stance.  NVIDIA shouldn’t be pulling strings as a graphics company that will allow their own chipset company to be the only supporter of their SLI technology.  This limits the ability for a competitive marketplace, and also limits the market size that NVIDIA hopes to sell their SLI technology to.  In the end though, I think it will work out that both VIA and NVIDIA chipsets will support the SLI technology, as media and end users push for it.

Conclusion

What is important is that users now see there are upgrade options that include AMD, and that these options don’t appear to be short sighted.  With 939-pin processors becoming available at lower prices, PCI Express graphics cards coming out at all price ranges, and now AMD chipsets with PCIe going to retail soon, an Athlon 64 buyer can feel more confident in their investment is in a safe upgrade path.  The K8T890 chipset offers everything a current and next-generation user is looking for in an AMD chipset, with the possible exception of immediate SLI support. 

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