VIA's K8T800 Pro Bumps up HyperTransport Speed, But Lacks Punch

VIA K8T800 Pro's Faster HyperTransport Bus

VIA's K8T800 Pro marks the first chipset that offers support for an accelerated HyperTransport bus with speeds up to 1 GHz. The launch of the chipset, which supports Athlon64 processors, also represents AMD's firing shots prior to Intel's new chipsets that will launch during the next few weeks.

Historically, VIA's chipsets have offered good performance with generally top rate features. Only their overclocking potential was held back by the lack of an AGP / PCI clock lock. The problem was that either the graphics card or the PCI components would refuse to operate if the clock speed were increased.

The Pro version now solves this problem by allowing the AGP bus to be set to 66 MHz and the PCI bus to 33 MHz. In addition, VIA has bumped up the speed of the HyperTransport bus, which connects the Northbridge and the processor, to 1 GHz compared to 800 MHz of the non-Pro version. However, this represents the sole major innovation that VIA has added to the new chipset compared to its predecessor.