VIA PT400 vs i865/i875: 133A vs 820 all over again?

[Athlon4all]

I dunno if you all have seen this. Asus, MSi and possibly Gigabyte are preparing VIA PT400 motherboards. When I saw this I just got into thinking. Are we going to see a 133A again with the PT400? Intel has no plans for a single channel DDR chipset that supports the 800fsb, but rather having people buy the i865, which is expensive to produce, although it does remain to be seen how expensive i865 boards will be. I think I heard a $130 price tag, and that is not bad, but VIA surely can undercut Intel's production costs. Just a thought, and this should be an interesting thing to keep an eye on.

 

[jaeger66]

The problem with the 820 was that is was a complete pile of crap AND ridiculously expensive, thus putting VIA into the spotlight. I'm not sure the 875/865 will be prohibitively expensive or so seriously flawed.

 

[Athlon4all]

I too doubt that the 865 will be as expensive as 820 was, but this is certainbly an interesting thing with Intel committing to a more expensive standard and a new faster bus but refusing to support the new faster bus with a cheaper memory (ie single channel DDR).

 

[codehack2]

Originally posted by: Athlon4all
I too doubt that the 865 will be as expensive as 820 was, but this is certainbly an interesting thing with Intel committing to a more expensive standard and a new faster bus but refusing to support the new faster bus with a cheaper memory (ie single channel DDR).

The i865 is slaighted to take the i845's place in the market. Given that, I'd fully expect to see i865 boards in the same price range as the current crop of i845 boards... i.e. $80 to $130. With that, the i865 will not require users to run paired dimms... use a single dimm and it will defualt back to single channel ddr, just like the e7205, sis655, nforce, nforce2, etc.

CH2

 

[AndyHui]

Not quite.

It's not talked about, but you CAN run the i865 and i875 chipsets in single channel mode, with just one DIMM.

If a DIMM in each channel is not detected, the chipset simply turns off one of the memory controllers, and you essentially have an i845 chipset with ICH5.