Anyone know when boards with VIA's K8T890 Pro will come out

[amol]

read title

 

[Mrvile]

Abit actually has a K8T890 board out, the AX8 series. They've been out for nearly two months on Abit's site, but still aren't in retail stores or venders yet, so I don't know what to tell you. Looks like they're right there on the verge though.

 

[gobucks]

The AX8 is the non-pro board, and Abit's pretty much admitted it jumped the gun by announcing their product after VIA's paperlaunch. I've only seen 1 Pro version announced the other day, and it sucks - it uses a x4 slot for the SLI, as opposed to nvidia's 8 & 8, and the southbridge is still the VT8237, which is getting pretty old. VIA's original plans called for the VT8251 southbridge, which brings NCQ support, HD-Audio, and Gigabit Ethernet, in addition to adding 2 x1 lanes for PCIe. However, now VIA has changed some of its roadmaps to say that boards will use the old southbridge for a while, and they won't even provide a rough timeline as to when the new southbridge will make an appearance. Until then, K8T890 Pro boards will continue to suck, since they can't have any PCIe x1 expansion lanes (they are all used up by the x4 graphics slot), and just can't compete with NF4. This is probably why there aren't very many VIA boards announced, and probably won't be this year. I was originally looking forward to the K8T890 Pro, but I have to say that VIA really dropped the ball this time, while nVidia is bringing us a winner, so I think my decision is made already.

 

[arswihart]

wasn't pro if it had vt8237