Based on the specifications, we can classify GA-K8VT890-9, a board based on VIA K8T890 chipset to be Gigabyte's weapon for the Athlon 64 Socket 939 value segment. As we have mentioned before, this board has the basic features that the average user would need. The board comes with 1x  PCI-E x 16 interface for PCI-E graphics card and PCI-E x 1 slots for future expansions. It also has built in 8 channel audio and supports 4 DIMM slots of DC-DDR400. On top of that, there is Gigabit Ethernet and SATA RAID 0,1,0+1 support.

In the test, the board is tested at SPD timings. Our SPD timing is CAS 2, 5-2-2 based on the Corsair TWINX modules. We knew about the CtrlF1 trick, but it seems that the ram timing options are not available for our adjustments. FSB range can be set up to 255MHz only and multiplier can be adjusted up to 20x. There are options for Maxmemclk for async memory clock. HTT width can be set to 8 or 16 bits and HTT can be set up to 1GHz. There are voltage adjustments for CPU Vcore and VDimm. In our overclocking tests, we are only able to overclock the FX-53 raising the HTT to 225 and with a multiplier of 8. Anything higher results in no POST. I hope they probably revise the BIOS to make it more overclocking friendly.

The performance of this board is indeed not bad after all. It is able to take on the NF4 boards in most cases. Although it is good, the chipset runs hot and I seriously suggest potential users to add active cooling to the north and south bridges.

Judging from its BIOS and packaging, I don't think its target market are gamers and overclockers. It might be a good board for system builders that just require something that is stable. Those who wants to overclock might have to look elsewhere, perhaps the Gigabyte's own NF4 solution.

Pricing

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Pros

• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB 2.0 
• SATA RAID
• FSB limited

Cons

• No 1394
• No SATA II
• No HD Audio

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.