Once the dominant player for chipsets compatible with AMD's Athlon, VIA has fallen out of favor lately, it seems. The company introduced its K8T890 chipset with PCI Express support way back in November of last year. Yet, we've heard very little about retail products centering on the platform until recently. The PT-series, destined for an epic battle against Intel's Pentium 4 chipset family, is still missing in action, with NVIDIA's competing core logic approaching at breakneck speed.

And then there's the VT8251 south bridge, an integral component in the grand scheme of things responsible for establishing parity with the latest crop of I/O controllers. It was originally slated to add Serial ATA 2 compliance, more PCI Express connectivity, and high-quality audio. No Gigabit Ethernet, but PCI Express controllers are better in that department, anyway.

Despite significant tardiness, a number of manufacturers have adopted VIA's K8T890 chipset and are selling motherboards designed to go up against NVIDIA's nForce4 lineup, specifically the nForce4 and nForce4 Ultra models. Soltek is one of the adventurous few; its K890Pro is actually well-equipped and it's affordable, too.

Specifications of the Soltek SL-K890Pro-939 Powered by VIA

Given its aggressive price point, Soltek is light on value-added extras, as we might expect. You do get an extra USB back-panel header, a couple of power adapters for SATA hard drives, four SATA data cables, IDE cables, a floppy cable, driver discs, and documentation.

The included quick installation guide wasn't very helpful. Stick with the 104-page user manual for guidance installing the board instead. And, interestingly, Soltek's Red Storm 2 overclocking utility is part of the K890Pro's software bundle as well, yet it's incompatible at this time. A rough start, to be sure, but the board's feature set is much more compelling.