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Introduction

Despite the fact that VIA announced that they had shipped their 100 Millionth chipset for AMD, it seems like that they've had some difficulties with getting the K8T890 out in volume. Despite an announcement during the fall that chipsets have been shipping out to partners, there are very few boards based around the K8T890 out and they certainly are not as pervasive as the nForce 4.

It's been a couple months now since we've looked at another K8T890 board, the Soltek SL-K890Pro-939. It was fast, (benchmarks are consistently high when pitted up against a variety of nForce 4 boards), stable and at the time, it had the best overclocking results out of any Socket 939 boards that we had tested. K8T890 boards are also looking cheaper than the nForce 4 Ultra equivalents though at the expense of a weaker feature set (which we will get to later).

After sampling a couple of Gigabyte's nForce 4 SLI boards, today we take a look at our second K8T890 board, the GA-K8VT890-9. With a bevy of PCIe products centered around the nForce 4, it seems like the K8VT890-9 is the entry level solution for customers looking at entering the PCIe world but are on a budget. There is no hardware firewall, nor fancy RAID implementation and certainly no SLI but it is a Socket 939 board and it is PCI Express based and is an upgrade friendly solution compared to Socket 754 and AGP based offerings.