ABIT VT8 (Via KT880 Pro) Pictures

[Apoptosis]

The ABIT VT8:


ABIT's has a VT8 Motherboard based off the PT880 Pro chipset. It will pack four-phase power, bus speeds up to 1066MHz, AGP and PCI-E graphics slots, but only DDR1 memory slots. Because it has the older VT8237 south bridge, the board will not include HD Audio, RAID 5, or any PCI-E x1 slots. Just recently we have begun to see x1 PCIe slots hit the market, so this southbridge choice could end up interesting. ABIT is expecting boards to ship in March of 2005 based on the VIA chipset seen above.

The Socket Area:


The VIA KT880 Pro Chipset:


Any thoughts on the layout or features? Discuss them here and we will get you the answers from ourselves or ABIT!

[infinitevalence]

Im dissapointed by the lack of RIAD5, more and more people are running raid setups like me, and i would have no problem springing for one more drive if i got that kind of data security.

DDR1 support is fine with me, as is the pcie and agp slot, to my knowlage the pcie slot is limited to 4x which is not bad but does hurt my interest, what really kills it is support for Intel CPUs ;)

[Apoptosis]

well, this is using the PT880 Pro and VIA 8237 Southbridge. I'm sure that ABIT and others will release a VIA powered Intel board with RAID 5 support. This was the only ABIT board on hand that day! ;)

[Illuminati]

Ya, I am bummed about that PCI-E slot not being a full 16x slot... kinda takes away the hopes of a board like this being the new LR vid card test machine to make nice apples to apples comparisons between AGP and PCI-E graphics...

Just to make sure I'm not incorrect here either, do one of the other new VIA chipsets offer a side-by-side 8x AGP slot and 16x PCI-E?

[infinitevalence]

i dont think you will see that much of a performance hit on the 4x slot as its still faster than an 8x agp and we all know that the difference going from 4x agp to 8x agp is almost nothing, i think you can do a apples to apples with this and just include tests on a full pcie 16x mobo to check your numbers. its worth a shot any way.

[Illuminati]

would definitely be an interesting test to see the scaling of 4x, 8x, 16x PCI-E... if it there is currently any difference.

[Crimson]

I was excited when i read about the VIA PT880, but then I noticed the fine print about the 4x PCIe.

I was planning on getting the ECS 915P with a 530 CPU. All this cause I didn't want to lose my vid card right now, and the budget is tapped on CPU, Mobo, and memory. Can't afford a new vid card too. But then I read the ECS fine print, the AGP isn't truly 8X. Considering I'm running 2X now, anything is an improvement, but I want to be able to upgrade to PCIe in the future.

So which should I do? ECS915P , or VIA/ and whatever MOBO? (PT880) Mostly for gaming...

thanks...

[skywalker]

What about vdimm? Since Abit actually gives lowm vdimm option that mostly overclockers hate it Hopefully VT8 provides more vdimm voltage.

[LVCapo]

WHY!!!!...do they put the floppy connector way down there?
And another thing that really bugs me is their new chipset cooler, which seems to always get in the way of largercoolers (CPNS 7700, XP-120).
I also think a lot of people are getting away from RAID arrays....while RAID5 addresses some of the issues in previous forms, RAID still doesn't perform real well in games.