THE VIA K8T800 is a very successful chipset and won many designs but nothing lasts forever and it's time to new along to new chipsets. When we asked couple of motherboard manufacturer they told us that Via's south bridge was actually the one that won over Nforce 3 150 in design wins. Quite simply, Nvidia's product didn't have Serial ATA in the south bridge, while Via offered this with its 8237 chip, as well as 800MHz hypetransport with 16 bit both uplink and downlink. It's time for speed upgrade and Via's new chipset is going to make Hypetransport even faster as it will work at 1000MHz, again with 16-bit uplink and downlink.
The chipset will support 939 pin CPUs, these will have a dual dual channel memory controller inside the chip. There are no indications so far that the K8T800 PRO will get a 754 design and we are not sure whether this chipset supports this socket at all but judging from the fact that K8T800 non PRO works with 940 and 754 sockets I don't see why not. The chipset is already sampling to motherboard manufacturers while the actual boards might show by the end of January 2004.
The only trouble might be that AMD won't be ready to ship socket 939 CPUs until March, we are informed. Does this means that socket 754 dies after the 3400+?
News source: The Inq
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