Board Images and System Setup

Board Layout and Images

As this is a reference motherboard, there is little that really needs to be discussed as far as the layout is concerned.  However, we’ll show a few shots of the board just in case you all might be interested.

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From this image you can see the entire 939-pin board layout.  There are only two PCIe slots on the board: one x16 and one x1 as this board was for technology testing purposes only. 

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The north bridge core-logic K8T890 chipset sits upon the first PCIe AMD board to hit the PCP test benches.

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One x16 PCIe and one x1 PCIe are seen here above three legacy PCI slots.

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Though again, not important for our purposes, this battery did become a problem for NVIDIA PCIe cards as they were long enough to come in contact with the battery retention clip.  This won’t be a problem when retail boards hit the market, though it did cause me to damage our 6800 GT here.  Doh!

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And as with most reference boards we see here in the lab, some hand made modifications are done to the first few reference boards to leave the company.  

System Setup

First, before we go much further, we need to address how you should look at the upcoming benchmarks.  This reference board was far from a retail-ready sample as it was prone to overheat and to crash every once in a while.  Such is the life of a reference board, never bound for long term use.  With this goes the dilemma of the board not being fully tweaked for performance purposes.  Though our tests were run at 6-3-3 2.0 memory settings, the BIOS and chipset itself was not setup like a normal manufacturer would design and thus the performance that we see here will be less than what we see on retail boards.  We see it happen this way pretty much every time with samples this early.  To sum up: take what you see for performance and add just a bit to it and you can use that as a guess as where the first boards we’ll have in at PCP will wind up at.

For our comparison, we simply took the K8T890 reference board and paired with with the AGP version of the identical setup.  This meant an AGP and a PCIe X800XT graphics card, two FX-53 processors and two sets of 1 GB memory from our friends at Corsair Memory.

VIA K8T890 Test System Setup

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 FX-53

Motherboards

VIA K8T890 Reference Board

Power Supply 

Antec 480 watt

Memory 

2x512MB Corsair Micro DDR500

Hard Drive

250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA

Sound Card

Creative Labs Live!

Video Card

ATI X800 XT

Video Drivers

ATI Catalyst 4.9

DirectX Version

DX 9.0c

Operating System

Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1

 

VIA K8T800 ProTest System Setup

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 FX-53

Motherboards

MSI K8T800 Pro board

Power Supply 

Antec 480 watt

Memory 

2x512MB Corsair Micro DDR500

Hard Drive

250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA

Sound Card

Creative Labs Live!

Video Card

ATI X800 XT

Video Drivers

ATI Catalyst 4.9

DirectX Version

DX 9.0c

Operating System

Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1

 

The benchmarks used were:

  • SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP1
  • AIDA32
  • Cachemem
  • Quake III: Arena
  • Unreal Tournament 2003
  • X2: The Threat
  • 3D Mark 2001: SE v330
  • 3DMark03
  • Far Cry 1.1
  • Doom 3
  • PC Mark 2002
  • PCMark04
  • Business Winstone 2004
  • Content Creation Winstone 2004
  • LAME MP3 Encoding
  • XMPEG / DivX Encoding
  • WinRAR Compression
  • CineBench 2003
  • ScienceMark 2.0 Beta
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