News Release

VIA, Maxtor First to Enable Serial ATA/RAID Integration for New AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor-Based Systems

Validation of Maxtor's SATA Drives with new VIA K8T800 chipset with native SATA RAID brings highest capacity, performance and enhanced data protection to new generation of high-end PCs featuring AMD64 technology

Taipei, Taiwan, 30 September 2003 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that Maxtor's DiamondMax® and MaXLine™ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives have been validated by VIA to run with the VIA K8T800 chipset for the new AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Athlon 64 FX, and AMD Opteron™ processors designed for the desktop, multi-processor workstation and server markets.

As the first core logic chipset solution to feature native Serial ATA/RAID support for the AMD Athlon 64, AMD Athlon 64 FX and AMD Opteron processor, the VIA K8T800 chipset gives white box manufacturers and system builders the ability to clearly differentiate their AMD64 systems in the market place by integrating one or two high-capacity, high-performance Maxtor SATA drives in a RAID for added performance, capacity and data protection.

In addition to native Serial ATA/RAID support through the VIA VT8237R South Bridge, VIA K8T800 also features VIA's unique Hyper8™ technology that enables a full 16-bit/1.6GHz implementation of the HyperTransport link between processor and chipset for the AMD Athlon 64 processor platform to ensure market-leading performance on today's existing 32-bit applications as well as providing all the necessary headroom for future 64-bit applications.

"The validation of Maxtor's SATA hard drives with the VIA K8T800 chipset will accelerate the adoption of Serial ATA/RAID technology on the AMD64 platform," commented Richard Brown, Associate Vice President of Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. "Motherboards based on the VIA K8T800 are now available in volume from all the world's leading mainboard manufacturers."

Maxtor's SATA drives are available in industry-leading capacity points from 80GB to 200GB for DiamondMax drives for high-performance desktop users and 250GB for MaXLine drives for near-line, disk-to-disk and other entry-level enterprise applications. The combination of a VIA K8T800 chipset based motherboard and two 250GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration gives gamers, graphic artists and video enthusiasts one half of a terabyte (TB) of storage in a single AMD Athlon 64 processor-based PC system. Maxtor's MaXLine and DiamondMax SATA drives are designed to offer higher data transfer rates, a more reliable connection, simpler RAID integration and faster HDD installation than parallel ATA drives. They also offer hot-plug compatibility and allow for smaller system designs.

"Our Serial ATA drives have received numerous industry-leading awards and benchmark scores from third-party websites and publications around the world. This demonstrates that our drives give users the fastest 7200RPM performance on the market today," said Stephen DiFranco, vice president of corporate marketing at Maxtor. "VIA's new K8T800 and AMD's new 64 bit solutions combined with our Serial ATA drives offer customers a wide variety of configurations for a diverse range of systems from high performance gaming PCs to entry-level enterprise applications."

VIA K8T800 chipsets and Maxtor MaXLine and DiamondMax Serial ATA hard drives are shipping in volume worldwide.

For more information about Maxtor's Serial ATA drives, please visit www.maxtor.com. For further information about the VIA K8T800 chipset and the VIA VT8237R South Bridge, please visit the VIA website at www.via.com.tw/en/k8-series/k8t800.jsp and www.via.com.tw/en/southbridge/VT8237R_index.jsp respectively

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