VIA K8T890 offers PCI-E

VIA has taken the wraps off its new VIA K8T890 chipset series, its foray into the market for PCI Express on systems built around the AMD64 processor.

Supporting 939, 940 and 754-pin connections, the VIA K8T890 can support the AMD Athlon 64, 64 FX, Opteron and Sempron processors, bringing a PCI-E x16 connection to the table.

"In addition to offering unparalleled performance, features, and stability, VIA K8T890 Series chipsets also offer the industry's most flexible PCI Express implementation available," said VIA's vice president of product marketing, Chewei Lin. "For our partners this means that they can deliver solutions with extensive PCI Express connectivity to ensure customers a future-proof platform to support the latest PC peripherals."

VIA K8T890 Series chipsets feature the company's VIA Flex Express Architecture, which accommodates a variety of PCI-E device configurations. The architecture support up to five PCI Express devices in its northbridge and a total of 20 PCI-E lanes, delivering a combined bandwidth of 10GB/s.

VIA K8T890 Series chipsets include support for the latest PCI Express x16 graphics cards, and up to four PCI Express x1 connections to high speed PCI Express peripherals, such as Gigabit Ethernet and bandwidth hungry HDTV tuner cards. VIA K8T890 Series chipsets also feature an asynchronous bus architecture, and taps a HyperTransport chipset-to-processor link, supporting a 1GHz/16-bit connection offering up to 8GB/s of bandwidth.

VIA also has previously announced plans to add a technology to the Series that it calls DualGFX Express, a solution designed to compete with NVIDIA's SLI technology, which allows for serial support for multiple graphics processors.

The Taiwanese manufacturer said that it has signed up a slew of motherboard manufacturers to build systems around the VIA K8T890 Series architecture. ABIT, ASUS, EPoX, Gigabyte and MSI have all pledged to create K8T890-based products.

"By enabling PCI Express support for the AMD64 platform, the VIA K8T890 chipset is providing AMD users the ability to upgrade with peace of mind that they have a future-proof system," said Timothy Hsu, product marketing manager at EPoX. "EPoX's new EP-8HEAI leverages the advanced VIA Flex Express Architecture of the VIA K8T890 chipset to provide blistering performance and rock-solid stability for a new generation, PCI Express-enabled Athlon 64 motherboards."
Quick Specs: VIA K8T890 Series
Source: VIA Technologies
Processor Support AMD Opteron / Athlon FX / Athlon 64 / Sempron (939, 940 & 754 pin)

Front Side Bus 1GHz/16-bit (Upstream & Downstream) HyperTransport Bus Link
PCI Express Graphics Support PCI Express x16 Graphics
PCI Express Peripheral Support 4 PCI Express x1
Bus Architecture Asynchronous