Albatron Technology recently announced its K8X890 Pro mainboard, which supports AMD Athlon 64 FX CPUs along with other 939-pin AMD processors. The K8X890 will be on store shelves at the end of December.
To provide more stability for gaming, Albatron has implemented a new type of power supply system on the K8X890. The CPU power supply area of the K8X890 Pro mainboard resides in an area called the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module). Power is delivered to the CPU in what are called “phases.” Each phase carries its share of the total power that is required by the CPU. The more phases you have, the less power is required from each phase. Less power carried by each phase reduces the temperature load on components, helping with stability and extending the life of the CPU. The original three phases of the VRM power area has been increased to four phases by adding a PWM (Power Width Modulation) module with the fourth phase. The PWM module is actually an interface card that installs easily onto the VRM area of the mainboard.

PWM module slot on the K8X890 Pro mainboard
Source: company, November 2004.
The K8X890 Pro also uses a VIA K8T890 Pro north-bridge supporting the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. These PCIe slots include a 16x slot for VGA cards and a 4x slot for future PCIe cards. The board supports dual-channel DDR400 for added performance enhancement.
The K8X890 Pro has a built-in VIA Envy 24PT audio chipset supporting 8-channel (hardware) audio, which allows the customer to use 7.1-channel amplifiers. The board also has built-in Marvell Gigabit LAN providing 10/100/1000 Mbps network connectivity over a single lane on the PCIe bus.
The board supports eight USB 2.0 ports and two IEEE 1394 interfaces. The VIA VIA8237R south-bridge provides support for two built-in serial ATA (SATA) channels that each provide 150MBytes/sec high-speed data access to hard drives. The SATA devices also support RAID 0, 1 disk-array functionality.

Albatron K8X890 Pro PCIe mainboard
Source: company, November 2004.
|
K8X890 Pro Mainboard Specifications | |
|
Item |
Description |
|
CPU |
Socket 939 (FSB 800MHz support) |
|
Chipsets |
VIA K8T890/8237 |
|
Form Factor |
ATX |
|
Memory |
4x184-pin DDR SDRAM |
|
PCI slots |
3 PCI |
|
PCIe slots |
1 – PCIe x16 |
|
USB support |
8 – USB 2.0 (4 by bracket & cable) |
|
HDD support |
2 – ATA 133 IDE ports |
|
Audio |
8-channel audio, SPDIF In/Out |
|
LAN |
Built-in Marvell Gigabit Ethernet controller |
Compiled by DigiTimes. Source: company, November 2004.





