VIA's PT880 Pro and PT894 series chipsets @ TechReport

Published by

Intel's 915 and 925X Chipsets made their debut last June, bringing with them a whole raft of new technologies all at once. Since then, Intel has had the P4 chipset market nearly all to itself. VIA is aiming to change that with the introduction of three new chipsets for the Pentium 4 sporting a wealth of new features, including PCI Express, that should finally give VIA chipsets feature parity with Intel.

Not only that, but VIA's PT880 Pro looks like an upgrader's best friend, with simultaneous support for AGP and PCI Express graphics cards. Some of the first PT880 Pro boards will even feature multiple DIMM slot types, with support for DDR and DDR2 memory.

Read on for the scoop on all of VIA's new chipsets, plus performance test results for the enthusiast-oriented PT894 chipset.