[zerodamage]

"The launch of Athlon 64 has brought us 2 chipsets thus far: the nVidia nForce3 150 and VIA K8T800. As we have discussed in reviews of boards based on these chipsets, neither one really meets the specifications that we would like to see in Athlon 64 chipsets.

While VIA performs at the specified 800 Hyper Transport speed, it is hampered by lack of a real means to fix AGP/PCI lock. This severely limits the ability of VIA chipset boards to overclock, and is the most important complaint we have had with this chipset. VIA is also a 2-chip solution and the actual communication speed between the North and South Bridge chips is specified as 500MHz, which is much slower than the 1.6GHz to 3.2GHz that is used for internal communication of the other components on HyperTransport. While VIA has made a lot of splash about being the “only” chipset to implement 800 HT speed, they are really telling only part of the story, since the slower North/South bridge communications are certainly a bottleneck if VIA is correct about the impact of a slower HT speed on other chipsets. You simply cannot have it both ways."

Source: Anandtech