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Box Contents

Although Gigabyte usually includes the kitchen sink and kitchen accessories with their product offerings, they have significantly scaled back the contents with the K8VT890. Included is a full fledged manual, a quick install guide, a driver CD, a PCI audio bracket, a single SATA, floppy, IDE and power converter. This is in contrast to their SLI board, for example which included 8 SATA cables. I can sort of understand not including the second SATA cable, but skimping out on a second IDE cable seems to be going overboard a little bit. Although the drivers for SATA controllers is usually on the CD, it would have also been nice if Gigabyte had included a floppy for Windows setup.

The Board Layout

The GA-K8VT890-9 sports the same color scheme as Gigabyte's ther motherboards, the blue PCB and the heavily colorized plastics to differentiate between components is like a signature move. There is no question about the practicality of the color scheme but from the visual perspective it's less than a sure hit.

The layout of the board is on the traditional side. Memory banks are located to the right of the processor. The ATX power connector is beside the memory bank while the 12v rail is just to the left of the processor socket which means more trouble for those that like to keep cabling clean.

IDE ports are beside the memory slots but the unlike the nForce 4 board, the floppy connector gets pushed down further. On the recent VIA boards that we've taken a look at including the K8T890 and the K8T800 Pro, the SATA ports are located very close to the southbridge meaning that they are not up against the edge of the board. Two sets of headers for four additional USB ports are found at the bottom edge of the board. It looks like that Gigabyte may put out a variant of this board with Firewire as there are areas on the PCB already marked out for it.

The included audio bracket is a nice bonus but the header placement on the board is a bit awkward. The analog header is just above the x16 PCIe slot while the SPDIF connector is the red connector between the two x1 PCIe slots. These positions are on the obtrusive side, again this is the same complaint with the split ATX/12v rail connector layout - put them together so cabling does not have to be a rat's nest inside the case. Also they should be above the x16 slot or below the PCI slots. The use of the audio bracket should not obstruct any of the expansion slots.

The processor socket is close to the top edge of the board so for ultra wide coolers like the Zalman CNPS7700, there may be an issue with certain chassis where there is not a lot of room above the top of the motherboard.

I do not remember the last time that we had a VIA based board with an actively cooled Northbridge and Gigabyte continues here with a passive solution. The southbridge apparently runs cool enough as is.