SLI/Crossfire are still so rarely of any use to the majority of people that I don't care about the whole dual-gpu era:
Why buy two 6800GS's when you can have a single 7800GT for less?
Why buy into ATI's near obsolete crossfire at all?

SLI is, IMHO literally only for those with money to burn and a penchant for one-upmanship over their fellow nerd.

To this end, the new VIA chipset looks brilliant. I was happy with the KT133, I was happy with the KT266a and since then I've been okay with an Nforce2 and an Nforce4. Some techies have issues with the minor bugs and quirks of a chipset, but we all know that none of them are flawless, not even the intel ones, and from that point of veiw - if the K8T900 is well priced and reasonably competetive, I don't see how it won't do well.

If this chipset overclocks just as well as a NF4, but doesn't require active cooling or some exotic passive solution. NF4 is in for some real trouble. Passive cooling for the chipset is a big deal among some ethusiast. Just ask anyone who had tasted the bitterness of cheapo HSF on the older ASUS NF4 boards.

Every VIA I've owned has never *quite* been stable. I've never had major problems, either, but when there are alternatives I don't see any reason to try again. No thanks. I'm just done with them. In fact I just ordered a new Nforce board and I wouldn't be regretting it no matter what this preview revealed.

I really only trust Intel and Nvidia right now. Haven't tried ATI yet, but doubt I will bother as Intel and Nvidia pretty much cover me.

And their video card sucks. I don't even want to hear it. They have a soild track record of crap. I find it highly unlikely they will ever be able to produce the kind of R&D needed to keep up. We can wish and hope that it will look better with the next driver update, or faster memory speed, but honestly I don't want to hear it. All the good intention and hope in the world will not make any VIA video card (or rather, anything not ATI or Nvidia) not crap. No one can touch them. Let's stop kidding ourselves.

The real question is how does it overclock, especially in regards to the HTT. Ati seems to have broken this barrier with its upcoming dual pciX16 board posting a 1600mhz speed in both directions. The multpiler can be left at 5x. If Via can do this for less I'd be interested.

Decent onboard graphics? Scandalous!

Looks...good. Bombed on Nano-ITX, win on the new chipset.

....I'd be temped if I weren't a rabid NV fanslut.

How come no one has posted about the graphics. If they can ship a card that has decent drivers, kudos to them. S3 has NEVER had a card that is really competitive since the 3d acceleration wars began. If it can run with a 6600 I'm impressed to say the least. But not that I'm going to buy one to beta test it.

Ummm... The ram is rated for CAS3, but runs 2.5-3-3-8 at *1.85V*?? That's really really good DDR1. Did you mean 2.85V?

VIA's issues were mainly the piss poor PCI bus (which impacted more than just Soundblasters) and the USB implementation wasn't so hot either. Course that might have been directly tied to the PCI bus issues. :P

As I see it, the 8235 made good on old sins. Too bad it took'em a few years to get there. :P

I suppose to be fair I should note that implementing PCI is apparently hard. Intel, NVIDIA, ATI, and VIA have all fudged it at least once.

The rest of the VIA issues of the timeframe seem to stem directly from piss poor caps.

That's pretty nifty that SLI works on this chipset. I think at this point Nvidia's only move is to ditch the whole nForce 4 SLI exclusive. If they don't, I think skilled disassemblers and hex editors will be dragging them out of it kicking and screaming since there's at least one driver revision that supports it(even unofficially).

Finally... with this new Via chipset I can fall in love with my computer again, be the hero of my family, get a better job, and get a girlfriend (don't know how my wife would feel about that last bit).

Very interesting indeed.

I sincerely hope they are able to get some traction in the market with these products (both the chipset and the GPU). Even if I don't end up buying one myself, competition is good.

I also agree 100% about the passive chipset cooling. After being burned again and again by crappy chipset fans, passive cooling is now one of the features I look for when buying a motherboard.

It's good to see that VIA's new generation chipset is still happy with the tiny heatsink on the northbridge and no cooling on the southbridge.

And maybe in 16 months it will actually be available on motherboards!

Via still sucks! I refuse to put anything Via in my PC.