Introduction
It's taken the rest of the computing world a little while to hop onto the PCI Express train and ride it into the homes and businesses of the world. Intel introduced their new Pentium 4 platform using the peripheral interconnect in June last year. More recently, NVIDIA brought nForce4 into the world and AMD users rejoiced. But that's been it, Intel and NVIDIA fighting the good fight solo. I'm sure they don't mind; it gives them maximum market share. More choice is always good and we've always been able to rely on VIA to fill in the gaps in the mainstream consumer space with increasingly able and speedy core logic products to be proud of.
And while we still wait anxiously for their KT890 AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron core logic, their Pentium 4 variant of the same stuff is here today. VIA's PT880 Pro and PT894 join the party and fill in two sizeable gaps in the PCI Express lineup for Intel's LGA775 processors. VIA were good enough to give me the first press look at the core logic and reference boards and I've had the boards, their core logic and obvious performance milling around in my head since very early January. It's time to get that down on the page.
Let's talk about PT880 Pro first since it's the most interesting of the two.
