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Summary

Introduction

With more and more PCI Express graphics cards being announced and released, it was beginning to be a sore spot on AMD's platform that they didn't have the ability to support PCI Express.  Since AMD is out of the chipset market (as they usually are until the release of a new core), it is left up to the 3rd party manufacturers to bring PCIe to the market.  VIA is the first out of the gate with their K8T890 chipset.

The basics of this new chispet are pretty simple: take the K8T800 Pro chipset, add in some 20 lanes of PCI Express support and you get K8T890.  Other than that, nothing has changed on the core logic at all.  This certainly is not a bad thing, as the K8T800 Pro was a great performer for the K8 market.  (If you want more details on the transition from AGP to PCIe on the AMD platform, or more technical info on the benefits of PCIe, check out our complete and detailed review of the K8T890 chipset.)

Since this is a preview article, not based on any actual retail product you can purchase, we'll skip over the usual board shot and look at the features.  This article is mainly a demonstration of the technology on the K8T890 and to prove that PCIe on the AMD processors is coming very soon.

Let's take a look at a couple of benchmarks between the K8T800 Pro and the K8T890 chipsets:

In nearly all the tests we ran, the K8T890 was either just slightly slower than or equal to the retail K8T800 Pro board from MSI.  Some of you may be thinking that VIA has done a poor job on the chipset as it is actually slower than the older generation K8T800, but in reality that is not the case.  It's really the work of guys like Asus, Abit and MSI who are in the position to stretch and push these reference boards beyond their limits. Because of this, the very small deficits we see with the K8T890 reference board are more than acceptable at this stage.  When the retail boards hit the street, we'll of course test again to see how performance improves.

I go over a lot more benchmarks, as well as detailed analysis of the Doom 3 tests and Far Cry tests in our full and detailed review of this chipset.  However, if this is your stop in reading, I encourage you to wait until we have our retail boards from VIA, NVIDIA and SiS with PCIe support before coming to any conclusions.

Click here for the Detailed Review