Desktop Chipsets

Native Serial ATA/RAID Support
The VIA VT8237R Plus South Bridge features a native Serial ATA/RAID controller, providing direct support for two 150MB/s Serial ATA devices, and an additional two (for a total of four SATA devices) in combination with the SATAlite interface. The integrated V-RAID controller supports native RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD, ensuring optimum data integrity and system performance, while the user-friendly V-RAID software interface enables easy disk array configuration and management.

VIA Modular Architecture Platform
The VIA K8T890 is part of VIA's unique Modular Architecture Platform (V-MAP), which minimizes design times and time-to-market for motherboard partners through a flexible, pin-compatible design approach for VIA core-logic solutions. Motherboard partners are able to cover multiple market segments with fewer design resources, and also benefit from a single unified driver base.

Ultra V-Link Bus
Delivering data throughput speeds of up to 1066 MB/s from the VIA VT8237R Plus South Bridge to the VIA K8T890 North Bridge, the Ultra V-Link interface delivers the necessary bandwidth and low latency required by today's increasingly demanding multimedia applications.

Asynchronous Bus Architecture
The VIA K8T890s asynchronous bus architecture enables power users to fully optimize their system settings for the ultimate PC gaming and entertainment experience, while maintaining platform stability.

Advanced PCI Express Peripheral Support
VIA Flex Express Architecture enables connection of up to 4 high bandwidth PCI Express x1 peripheral devices directly through the North Bridge of the K8T890 chipset, ensuring low latency and wide memory access, as well as freeing up I/O bandwidth in the chipsets South Bridge, which increasingly deals with the heavy bandwidth requirements of multiple HDDs, optical drives and USB/1394 devices.

VIA Flex Express Architecture
The unique has been designed to allow the industrys most flexible implementations of core-logic chipsets supporting PCI Express. The VIA Flex Express architecture allows multiple device configurations, supporting up to five PCI Express devices across 20 PCI Express lanes with an amazing combined bandwidth of 5GB/s.

? RAID Level 0+1 requires four Serial ATA drives; support for the two additional drives can only be implemented with two external Serial ATA ports enabled through a SATALite PHY.

? 8-channel audio requires addition of VIA Vinyl Gold companion controller

?Please refer to AMD validated

SATALite interface for two additional SATA devices 4 total)

Dual Channel Serial ATA supports 2 SATA devices

6 slots

VIA integrated 10/100 Fast Ethernet

VIA Velocity Gigabit Ethernet (PCI companion controller)

VIA Vinyl Gold 8-channel Audio? (PCI companion controller)

VIA Vinyl 6-channel Audio (AC'97 integrated)

DDR memory controller integrated directly into AMD64 processor?

AMD Opteron / Athlon FX / Athlon 64 / Sempron (939, 940 & 754 pin)

For connectivity to the South Bridge the VIA K8T890 features a high bandwidth Ultra V-Link bus to allow communication between the chipset North and South bridges at a blazing 1GB/s. When combined with solutions such as the market-leading and a broad array of VIA companion chips, the VIA K8T890 chipset provides the most comprehensive range of storage, multimedia and connectivity features available for the AMD64 processor platform today, including native Serial ATA and V-RAID, 6-channel or 8-channel VIA Vinyl Audio, VIA Velocity Gigabit Ethernet, USB2.0, and 1394.

The VIA K8T890 integrates VIAs supporting a 1GHz/16-bit HyperTransport processor-to-chipset link, that delivers up to 8GB/s of bandwidth to help ensure all AMD64 processor-based systems achieve their full performance potential. The VIA K8T890 chipset also utilizes asynchronous bus architecture, providing improved system optimization options to enable power users to squeeze the very most out of their systems.

The VIA K8T890 chipset has received , having successfully completed the rigorous testing procedures of the PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop.

The first PCI Express chipset for the AMD platform, the VIA K8T890 chipset is designed to fully meet the increased system bandwidth demands placed on the PC. Designed to support a complete range of AMD Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Opteron, and Sempron processors, the VIA K8T890 delivers high performance, comprehensive features, and rock solid stability. The K8T890 chipset is , featuring a PCI Express x16 connection for up to 4GB/s of dedicated graphics bandwidth per direction, and provides four PCI Express x1 connections. Each 1x PCI Express connection provides 250MB/s per direction bandwidth to PCI Express peripheral devices such as Gigabit Ethernet and HDTV tuner cards.