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Overclocking

With the limited number of enthusiast options in the BIOS, it probably should come as no surprise that overclocking on the GA-K8VT890-9 is fairly limited. CPU bus speed from 200-220 worked fine on our processor but at speeds above 220, Windows would not boot off the SATA controller.

Conclusions

As we have seen with other K8 solutions, the differences between different boards and even platforms are fairly minimal due to the on-die memory controller and as such the GA-K8VT890-9 is able to hang in there with some of the higher end boards without too much difficulty. Where the different platforms differentiate themselves is in the overclocking and the features department. Overclocking is a wash with the current BIOS with the GA-K8VT890-9 and easily has the least headroom that we have seen out of all the PCIe 939 solutions that we have looked at. We have seen Gigabyte make significant improvements to the overclocking ability on their boards in the past, but as such, this is definitely not an enthusiast board. On the features front, the K8T890 and VT8237R from VIA is outclassed by NVIDIA's nForce 4 MCP having fewer SATA channels, fewer disk features, no integrated network controller or firewall. Gigabyte's ace in the hole is that the MSRP for this board is cheap - at 82$ USD this is probably the most economical solution out there for someone looking to migrate to PCIe and socket 939.