Like Intel's high-end 875P and mid-range 865PE chipsets, the PT880 supports dual-channel DDR400 memory, an 800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading, and AGP 8X. The PT880 north bridge chip lacks the 875P's support for ECC memory and a networking interface like Intel's Communication Streaming Architecture (CSA), but that's all VIA's double-barreled north bridge is missing.

While potential SL-PT880Pro buyers surely won't mind that the board doesn't support ECC memory, it would be nice if VIA had something to compete with Intel's CSA. CSA gives Gigabit Ethernet controllers direct access to the north bridge chip, which frees up both PCI bus and interconnect bandwidth for other devices. Instead of hooking into a CSA-like interface, the SL-PT880Pro's VIA VT6122 Gigabit Ethernet controller rides the PCI bus and shares limited bandwidth with other devices.

Fortunately, unlike PCI, the Ultra V-Link connection between the PT880 north bridge and the VT8237 south bridge has plenty of bandwidth to spare, with a data rate of over 1GB/s—four times that of Intel's pokey 266MB/s "Accelerated Hub" link.

VIA's VT8237 south bridge serves up eight USB ports, two ATA/133 channels, two Serial ATA ports, and six-channel audio. The VT8237 supports two-drive RAID 0 and 1 arrays using VIA's V-RAID software. If that's not enough, the SL-PT880Pro also features Promise's PDC20378 RAID controller, which supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 arrays across two Serial ATA and two "parallel" ATA devices. Unfortunately, "parallel" ATA drives connected to the PDC20378 have to share a single ATA/133 channel, which will invariably degrade performance. The PDC20378 doesn't appear to support single-drive configurations, either.

Soltek pairs the SL-PT880Pro's integrated VT8237 audio with VIA's VT1616 codec chip, rather than the more common ALC650 codec. VIA's popular VT6307 IEEE 1394 Firewire controller rounds out the SL-PT880Pro's smattering of peripheral chips. The VT6307 actually supports up to three IEEE 1394 devices, but Soltek only takes advantage of two of the chip's Firewire ports.