First Look: VIA K8T900

Testing Methods:

After a recent editorial, we have decided to change the way we review motherboards here at bit-tech. We've moved our focus away from synthetic benchmarks that provide meaningless numbers from scenarios the consumer rarely finds themselves in.

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra's unbuffered memory bandwidth benchmark - which, incidentally, measures real memory bandwidth when you need it most - all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

Due to this motherboard being reference design product that will never be sold, we have not subjected it to our usual extensive stress testing. However, we can report that the motherboard was completely stable during our evaluation period. We had some initial problems before Windows was installed, but that was all solved after updating to the latest BIOS supplied to us by VIA.

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); VIA K8T900 Reference Motherboard; 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB 7,200RPM SATA 150 hard disk drive; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA ForceWare 81.94.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR (nForce 4 SLI); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB 7,200RPM SATA 150 hard disk drive; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA ForceWare 81.94.

Memory Performance:

The VIA K8T900 chipset's raw memory bandwidth appears to be very good in comparison to the figures we recorded for DFI's LANParty nF4 SLI-DR. There was about 30MB/sec difference in performance, which equates to less than 1% faster than the nForce 4 SLI core logic at the centre of DFI's nF4 SLI-DR.

WMV9 High Definition 720p Playback:

We found that the K8T900 chipset used slightly more CPU than the DFI nF4 SLI-DR. When we say slightly more, we mean slightly more - it used 0.4% more CPU power than the nForce 4 SLI-based nF4 SLI-DR board. There was no slowdown during playback on either motherboard, and we believe the additional 0.4% CPU useage is a non-issue.