Introducing The Motherboard; Introduction - ECS K8T890-A Manual

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Chapter 1

Introducing the Motherboard

Introduction

Thank you for choosing K8T890-A motherboard of great performance and with enhanced
function. The K8T890-A is designed to fit the AMD K8 processors in the 939-pin package.
Based on the ATX form factor, measuring 305 mm x 211 mm, this motherboard incorpo-
rates the following chipsets: K8T890 Northbridge and VT8237 Southbridge chipsets.
The K8T890 Northbridge features the HyperTransport Technology to transfer of 2000MT/
s, 1600 MT/s, 1200 MT/s, 800 MT/s or 400 MT/s each direction simultaneously, providing
a total maximum data transfer bandwidth of 8 GB/sec. Two 184 pin unbuffered DDR
SDRAM DIMM sockets support up to 2 GB in total memory. Aside from the onboard AGP
Express slot, one PCI Express x16 slot, intended for Graphics interface, is fully compliant
to the PCI Express Base Specification revision 1.0a. The K8T890 Northbridge intercon-
nects to the South Bridge through the high speed 8x 66 MHz (533 MB/sec) V-Link inter-
face.
The VT8237 Southbridge is a highly integrated peripheral controller, it includes an inte-
grated keyboard controller with PS2 mouse support, two-channel Serial ATA/RAID hard
disk controller, master mode enhanced Parallel IDE controller with full scatter/gather
capability and extension to UltraDMA-133/100/66 for 133/100/66 MB/sec transfer rate,
integrated USB 2.0 interface supporting up to 8 USB 2.0 ports. The VT8237 features
outstanding expansion capibility such as, five PCI slots with PCI v2.2 compliant. The
VT8237 integrated Fast Ethernet controller with standard MII interface to an external
PHY for 10/100Mb Base-T Ethernet, as well as AC'97 audio codec compliant.
There is an advanced full set of I/O ports in the rear panel, including PS/2 mouse and
keyboard connectors, COM1, LPT1, four USB ports at the rear I/O, one LAN port (op-
tional), and audio jacks for microphone, line-in, and line-out.
Introducing the Motherboard