Conclusion
Since the HyperTransport channel's clock speed increase from 800 MHz to 1 GHz is not all that much, don't expect great changes the way of performance. As our benchmarks with the 1 GHz HyperTransport bus reveal, the results are practically the same compared to what the 800 MHz bus offers. Therefore, Socket 939 motherboards won't peform noticeably better. Indeed, as our benchmarks have shown, differences between 600 MHz, 800 MHz and 1000 MHz HyperTransport clock speeds are barely measurable.
However, we expect that the faster HyperTransport configuration will bring considerable advantages in multi-processor systems, in which the HyperTransport design will link dual or quad-Opteron architectures.
Nonetheless, the K8T800 Pro is the better choice for overclocking experiments since the AGP and PCI buses, now decoupled from the system, are able to run at either 33 MHz or 66 MHz.
In the end, VIA should keep an eye on NVIDIA. Until the new Southbridge VT8251 is launched, NVIDIA's nForce3 250 GB , which offers an integrated gigabit Ethernet controller, as well as an integrated hardware firewall, offers more interesting features.
