I had really hoped that the old days of VIA were over, but I suppose they can and do rear their ugly head every now and then. VIA said Friday that there is an incompatibility with their K8T890 chipset and Athlon 64 X2 processors, though updated silicon fixing the incompatibility would be shipping to motherboard vendors very shortly.

It is unclear what the exact reason behind incompatibility of VIA's core-logic and AMD's dual-core processors is. AMD Athlon 64-series processors use Hyper-Transport bus, which is an industry standard that does not change from revision to revision, that ensures interoperability between variety of mainboards and processors, even despite of actual speed-bin. Furthermore, AMD64 processors integrate memory controller and arbitration logic for dual-core chips called System Request Interface, which make AMD64 platforms very flexible when it comes to chipset support.

The good news is that the K8T800 and K8T800 Pro are fully compatible, so VIA must have broken something with the K8T890. The bad news is that people who bought Socket 939 system with a K8T890, thinking they were paving the way for later upgrades, are now SOL. What can I say? I'm glad I chose nForce 3.

Article Link: A VIA Chipset Does Not Support AMD Dual-Core Chips

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