The Mother Board

[MoboCop]

WE FIRST PREVIEWED VIA's K8T890 chipset all the back in September of last year. At the time, VIA seemed poised for victory in the race to bring PCI Express to the Athlon 64. Unfortunately, VIA had some problems with PCI-E, delaying production boards based on the chipset. K8T890 boards are only now hitting the market, some six months after our initial chipset preview.

Had it been released earlier, a board like Soltek's K8T890-based SL-K890PRO-939 could have been among the first PCI Express platforms for the Athlon 64. Now it faces a market filled with motherboards based on NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset family that have raised our expectations for the marriage of PCI-E and AMD64. Read on to see if the SL-K890PRO-939 measures up.