14 DAY TRIAL // Via has recently announced that two of its most known chipsets have passed the certification tests and that they now have Vista ready chipsets. The announcement regards K8M890 and P4M900 chipsets. The certification testing confirms that installation of Vista has completed error-free and that the PCs using Vista and Via's motherboards work without errors. The Windows Vista Ultimate, Enterprise, Business, Home Premium and Home Basic editions have been used to perform the compatibility tests, said Via in a statement.
Via chipsets have two components, the northbridge (links memory and other high speed ports and devices) and the southbridge (links pci slots, controllers, audio and other devices). As for the new chipsets, Via K8M890 works with the full range of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Athlon64 processors and also with AMD Semprons, including CPUs made for the latest AM2 socket (there are both 939 and AM2 forms of the KM890 chipset). The Via P4M900 chipset is designed to work with Intel CPUs and supports a maximum FSB speed of 1,066MHz including the latest Intel Core 2 Extreme CPUs.
Aside from the fact that both Via K8M890 and Via P4M900 chipsets have acquired Vista Certification, the two chipsets come with integrated GPUs (the Via Chrome 9 IGP), which have hardware DirectX 9.0 capabilities. Among the advantages a DirectX 9 GPU has, comes the ability to enhance the appearance of Vista by adding Aero visual interface support and hardware decoding of various formats. The two products also come with 16x PCIE slots for add-on graphics cards. Both chipset-based motherboards are already available at various suppliers and system integrators. The beginning of 2007 will also add KM960 products to Via's motherboard family.