Introduction

AMD Athlon 64 has become the ultimate in gaming processors. It was clear from the beginning that AMD was going to dominate its gaming platforms over the Intel counterparts. Athlon 64 with its integrated on CPU memory controller, built in Northbridge as well as its latest high speed K8 architecture, there is definitely a reason to support the AMD Athlon 64 widely.

The Athlon 64 has been a little behind the times in terms of adding its support for PCI-Express, however, this is not because of an issue with AMD but rather with the third party companies that support AMD Athlon 64 like nVidia, ATI, ULi and VIA.

Intel got the drop on AMD when it came to PCI Express support, it was a good 6 months before AMD Athlon 64 managed to even get its CPU's on a PCI-E platform. nVidia was actually the first to bring it to market with VIA following close behind, and today we are taking a look at the VIA offering for K8 with PCI-E support.

Today we take a look at the Gigabyte K8T890-9 motherboard designed for Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64's with support for the latest Athlon 64 x2 processors which is based on VIA's K8T890 chipset.