VIA K8T890 Series Chipsets

Name: VIA K8T890 Series Chipsets - Page 4
Brand: VIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, September 24, 2004, 06:00 AM EDT

As most of you are probably aware, NVIDIA and Alienware have the gaming community buzzing at the prospect of running dual PCI Express graphics cards in a single system for increased performance. Although VIA hasn't made any announcements claiming "SLI-type" support in their S3 DeltaChrome 3D GPUs, they're going to offer support for dual PCI Express video cards with the K8T890 Pro version of the chipset...

VIA Dual GFX Express

Graphics Taken to Another Level

As you can see in the image above, VIA's "Dual GFX Express" technology offers full support for dual PCI Express graphics card implementations. Although astute observers may notice that each of the graphics cards connected to the Northbridge in the block diagram above, don't have the number of PCI Express lanes per connection specified. We've been told that a DualGFX motherboard will feature 2 Graphics slots, and one slot will have 16-lanes and the secondary slot will have 4-lanes. 4-lanes provides approximately 2GB/s of overall bandwidth, and in comparison AGP 8x at its max provided 2.2GB/s.

Also note that the additional 4 PCI Express X1 lanes shown in the K8T890 block diagram aren't listed in this images depecting the K8T890 Pro. In this case,we were told that all 20-lanes are being used by the graphics implementation. On this platform PCI Express x1 connectivity will be provided through VIA's upcoming VT8251 South Bridge.

Another thing to note is the dual PCI Express graphics slots, aren't just for gamers. Users can simply enjoy the benefits of having dual graphics cards in a system. Aside from the performance increases having an NVIDIA SLI configuration will offer, having dual graphcis cards will give users the ability to run dual independant applications accelerated on each card. You could have Maya running, fully accelerated, on one monitor, with 3D Studio Max running on the other. Plus, there's the benefit of having dual video cards, powering up to four displays. And this support is already built into Windows XP.

Tags: VIA, Chipset, Chip, chips, IPS, chipsets, K8, IE, IP, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com