VIA had their K8T890 chipset announced for the Athlon64 platform quite some time back. If we remember right, it was announced before nVidia’s nForce4 as the first PCI Express solution for the AMD platform. However, boards based on this chipset are yet to make an appearance on store shelves. Today, we take a look at the first K8T890 motherboard we’ve received and its from Soltek which was one of the very few companies that impressed us with their previous generation K8T800 PRO chipset board. Lets find how this new Soltek and VIA solution compares to the other nForce4 based motherboards.

Packaging

Soltek uses the same packaging for their K8T980 board like they did for their K8T800 which is a good thing. We like the large shiny box with the flap on the front that should get the attention of a shopper. However, the box is a bit generic and only a small sticker on the side tells you the chipset this board is based on.

Inside the box, Soltek bundles a rounded IDE cable as well as standard IDE and floppy cables all of which are purple and match the board. You also get four SATA cables along with their power converter cables as well as a back plate for USB. Unfortunately, like their K8T800 PRO board, the parallel port header is not present which might be inconvenient for some. A reasonable user’s manual and a quick start guide are also included in the package while CDs for drivers and applications like PC cillin 2004, Virtual Drive 7 and RestoreIT are also included.

Layout

Like their K8T800 PRO board, Soltek uses a black / purple combination which certainly looks good. However, newer PCI Express slots are white in color which somewhat spoil the look. The CPU socket is somewhat in a tight place with a row of capacitors on one side, the Northbridge heatsink on the other and the edge of the board on another side. We do like the fact that Soltek uses a passive Northbridge cooler which results in a quieter system.

You can find the memory slots next to the CPU socket and the main power connector to the top right edge of the board which is a good place for it. The four pin connector is present behind the back panel towards the top of the board which will keep your system tidy. One thing that we haven’t seen in some time is the usage of jumpers for onboard components and we were quite surprised to find them on the K8T890 Pro for enabling/disabling the onboard RAID and LAN. Sotlek should move these options in the BIOS.

All the IDE and SATA ports powered by either the Southbridge or the onboard controller are present below the PCI slots. While we like the SATA connectors here, we prefer the IDE controllers closer to the memory slots. The bottom edge of the board has the floppy connector which, again, in our opinion, should be next to the memory slots. Soltek places two USB headers and one Firewire header close the PCI-E x1 slots which is a decent position for them. An onboard diagnostic LED and the reset jumper are placed along the bottom edge of the board making them a bit hard to access once your system is inside your casing.