The PT894 in action
We do have some benchmark numbers from a reference board supplied to us by VIA. Generally, VIA's reference boards have been far from polished, but their performance has usually been reasonably similar to final production boards. In this case, we have a reference board based on the PT894 Pro chipset with DDR memory slots onboard. Because it's a PT894, we can't try either of the dual graphics implementations VIA will be offering, either AGP/PCI-E or dual PCI-E. Also, since this board has a VT8237 south bridge, we'll have to stick to testing the new PT894 north bridge for the most part; the VT8237 is already familiar territory for us. (If you'd like to see some numbers of the VT8237 versus the Intel ICH6, go see our review of the nForce4 Ultra.)


VIA's PT894 reference mobo

We also ran into an issue with the reference board and a 1066MHz front-side bus: that is, it didn't work. We tried setting DIP switches, changing BIOS settings, and the like, to no avail. That confined our testing to an 800MHz bus.

All in all, I think the following benchmark numbers may be a useful indicator of the PT894's performance in a very common configuration—with a Pentium 4 Prescott CPU and an 800MHz front-side bus using DDR400 memory and a single PCI-E graphics card—but I would caution against putting too much stock in these numbers. Performance could vary greatly on production boards and in different configurations.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Processor Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4GHz Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4GHz Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped) 1GHz HyperTransport 1GHz HyperTransport 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped) 1066MHz (266MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard VIA reference ATI reference NVIDIA reference Abit AA8 DuraMax Intel D925XECV2
BIOS revision 5873-V13 B10 4.70 1.4 CV92510A.86A.0338
North bridge PT894 Radeon Xpress 200 nForce4 Ultra 925X MCH 925XE MCH
South bridge VT8237R Radeon Xpress 200 ICH6R ICH6R
Chipset drivers Hyperion v4.55v p1 10/31/04 beta ForceWare 6.31 beta INF Update 6.0.1.1002
IAA for RAID 4.5.0.6515		 INF Update 6.0.1.1002
IAA for RAID 4.5.0.6515
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs) 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz OCZ PC3200 EL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz OCZ PC2 5300 DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz OCZ PC2 5300 DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
CAS latency (CL) 2 2 2 3 3
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 2 2 2 3 3
RAS precharge (tRP) 2 2 2 3 3
Cycle time (tRAS) 5 5 5 10 10
Hard drive Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB SATA 150
Audio Integrated VT8237R/VT1617A with 6.14.1.4050 drivers Integrated with 5.00.30001.20 drivers Integrated Integrated ICH6R/ALC880 with 5.10.0.5022 drivers Integrated ICH6R/ALC880 with 5.10.0.5032 drivers
Graphics 1 GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 66.81 drivers GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 66.81 drivers GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 66.81 drivers GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 66.81 drivers GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E with ForceWare 66.81 drivers
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c

All tests on the Pentium 4 systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled.

Thanks to OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, OCZ's RAM is definitely worth considering.

Also, all of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1152x864 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.