January this year VIA announced that they would be producing three new Pentium 4 LGA775 chipsets. If you can recall, I published a short article summarizing what these new chipsets had to offer. The Pentium 4 market has never really been cracked open by VIA and these new chipsets looked like their first real hope at doing so. However as I said in that article posted back in January, I did not expect to see any real production boards appear for at least another six months. Well it is now a little over six months later and I have finally got a production board in my hands ready to show you all.
Unfortunately for VIA, much has changed in the LGA775 market since they originally announced their three new Pentium 4 chipsets for 2005. These three new chipsets were named the PT880 Pro, PT894 and PT894 Pro. At the time of their announcement they were going to be the first viable third party alternatives to the Intel chipset series. However, that is no longer the case as NVIIDA were first to the punch with their nForce4 SLI ?Intel Edition?chipset.
While the PT880 Pro provides an excellent upgrade path, as it allows the motherboard to support both AGP and PCI Express, it is unfortunately crippled in a number of ways. Firstly because the chipset was developed over six months ago it only officially supports an 800MHz FSB and therefore not 1066MHz FSB processors. This has been corrected by the PT880 Ultra which differs only by its inclusion of support for the 1066MHz FSB. Another crippling factor of this chipset is the PCIe x4 bandwidth limitation. This means that the PCIe x16 graphics port really only operates at x4 making it much slower. The chipset also fails to offer PCI x1 support, featuring just native PCI support instead.
However, the board does support AGP 8x and it does do it correctly at full speed. The AGP 8x port is genuine, it can also work along side the PCIe x16 (x4) port. This means for example, you would be able to use a Radeon 9800XT (AGP) with a Radeon X800XT (PCIe) graphics card at the same time. Now in a normal single monitor setup this kind of solution will offer very little as the primary graphics card will be doing all the rendering while the secondary card does nothing. However with two, three or four monitors this configuration is highly beneficial to the user.
A dual monitor setup for example can be configured so that the Radeon X800XT (PCIe) renders the visuals on monitor one where as the Radeon 9800XT (AGP) will render to monitor two. For a game such as Quake III Arena this can be great for maximizing frame rates, as a single graphics card will only have to render half as much detail. The same scenario can be played over a quad monitor setup and again each graphics card will only do half the work load.
Another advantage to this chipset is its ability to operate with either DDR or DDR2 memory. This means board manufacturers are free to include either memory type on their motherboards or of course both. However, while the PT880 Pro is quite flexible when it comes to graphics and memory technology, the chipset does unfortunately suffer from a lack of features. When compared to the competition this chipset does have very little on offer, even for a budget solution. For example, the chipset features just 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 SATA150 devices, 6-Channel Audio and that's about the bulk of it.
Gigabyte GV-3D1-68GT Review (2005-08-11)