Mainboards for AMD Athlon 64 processors with PCI Express bus support are getting more and more popular. In fact, this is not surprising at all, because graphics card developers focused all their major efforts on the support of PCI Express bus, so that all newest graphics accelerators are designed to support this particular interface. So, AGP graphics cards are little by little leaving the market. Therefore, the chipsets for AMD Athlon 64 processors supporting PCI Express bus appear the most acute products nowadays.

Actually, the existing Socket 939 mainboards supporting PCI Express bus are currently based on one of the three chipsets. First of all, these are the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset series, which we have already discussed in great detail in our mainboard reviews.

Also, PCI Express solution for AMD Athlon 64 processors is available from ATI. However, this solution called RADEON XPRESS 200 is not that widely spread yet and is mostly used by OEM and system integrators. The retail mainboards based on this chipset will hardly an attractive purchase for hardware enthusiasts, because they do not offer any options for efficient CPU overclocking.

The third chipset for Athlon 64 processors with PCI Express bus support was developed by VIA and is called K8T890. Although this chipset was announced together with NVIDIA nForce4 about half a year ago, the mainboards based on it are just beginning to appear in retail. Of course, we couldn't miss this important event in the hardware world and decided to compare the performance of these mainboards with the already recognized sales hits, nForce4 based solutions.

So, today we are going to take a really close look at one of the first retail mainboards based on the VIA K8T890 chipset ?ASUS A8V-E Deluxe. Moreover, basing on the features of this solution we will also try to evaluate the potential and market prospective of the VIA K8T890 chipset against the background of pretty successful NVIDIA nForce4 solution.