Review: VIA K8T800 Pro (S940) Chipset

by Tarinder Sandhu on 24 May 2004, 00:00

Tags: VIA Technologies (TPE:2388)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qayd

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ScienceMark 2.0, Pifast

It's a straight shootout between three chipsets split over 2 socket formations. Don't be surprised to see EPoX's S754 8KDA3+ board do well. We're able to run 2-2-2-6 latencies without a problem. Your problem in replicating these results in finding RAM that can run at those timings. Winbond BH5, which is used on the Corsair XMS3500C2's RAM, is as hard to find as the proverbial hens' teeth.



Latency doesn't help much when S754 is limited to a single-channel memory interface. VIA's reference board does pretty well, just shy of the ASUS' 5.6GB/s bandwidth.



VIA's reference board matches a decent K8T800's (non-Pro) latency, according to ScienceMark. Slightly tighter timings shave off an unexpectedly large amount of latency. We can already see that the Pro chipset doesn't do much for performance, but we also kind of expected that. Most of the usual chipset optimisation has been removed by AMD's Athlon 64 range of CPUs.



It's all too close to call in Pifast, too. Less than a second separates two different CPUs and three chipsets. Like us, you may be wondering what's the real performance benefit of the FX CPUs over the regular Athlon 64 754-pin processors.