The specs
As always, we'll kick things off with a quick look at the GA-K8VT890-9's spec sheet.

The GA-K8VT890-9's specs are unremarkable overall, but there's only so much that can be expected from an $80 motherboard. That said, the board does have a number of key features, many of which it owes to its VIA K8T890 chipset. The K8T890 north bridge handles all of the board's PCI Express connectivity, including two x1 slots and a single x16. Gigabyte pairs the K8T890 north bridge with VIA's venerable VT8237 south bridge, a chip that's been making the rounds for well over a year now. The VT8237 is certainly capable, but its feature set is a little dated. For example, although the VT8237 supports Serial ATA RAID, it only does so for two SATA drives. The VT8237 also lacks support for "parallel" ATA RAID and SATA Native Command Queuing.

In addition to having a dated storage controller, the VT8237's networking capabilities are a little behind the times. However, Gigabyte nicely makes up for this deficiency by equipping the GA-K8VT890-9 with a PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet chip from Marvell. The PCI-E GigE controller should offer superior performance to PCI-based solutions, something we'll test a little later.

Although PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet might be considered lavish for a budget motherboard, the GA-K8VT890-9's audio capabilities are considerably more frugal. The board sports an eight-channel Realtek ALC850 codec, but only comes with audio jacks for six-channel output. Those who wish to take advantage of all eight output channels will have to pay a couple of dollars extra for a rear surround audio bracket. Selling the eight-channel bracket separately makes the board a little bit cheaper, and in this case, that makes perfect sense. After all, how many budget-conscious users are running eight-channel speaker systems?

One last item of note on the GA-K8VT890-9's spec sheet is the board's lack of Firewire. It's actually been a while since we've seen a board without Firewire support, but the GA-K8VT890-9's budget price point only allows for so many perks.