Our quick first look at the K8T900 is promising. VIA's new chipset largely keeps up with the nForce4 SLI, and it might gain some ground once VIA completes its SATA drivers with NCQ support. The K8T900's spec sheet gives it a couple of advantages over the nForce4 SLI and the Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition, and we've demonstrated today that its dual-GPU performance is quite solid, both with S3's MultiChrome and, when allowed, with SLI. The new nForce4 SLI X16 doesn't appear to perform any better than the older nForce4 SLI in most cases, so the K8T900 may not be completely overmatched against the newer dual 16-lane chipsets from NVIDIA and ATI.

Handicapping the K8T900's prospects simply by looking at this handful of benchmark scores or by ticking off must-have features on the spec sheets won't do much good, though. Obviously, VIA needs ATI and NVIDIA to open up their multi-GPU schemes to third-party chipsets in order for the K8T900's ability to support two graphics slots to matter much. Yes, the existence of MultiChrome gives VIA a little bit better position among low-end solutions, but many folks just aren't ready to buy an S3 graphics card yet-and the Chrome S27 isn't selling stateside yet, anyhow.

The chipset appears to be a very competitive one from VIA. At least, in terms of performance. The K8T900 reference board managed to match the popular DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR across our selection of real-world and gaming scenarios. The platform appears to work well, too, which is good to see from a reference motherboard.

The VT8251 South Bridge works well too. The inclusion of a SATA II controller with Native Command Queuing, hot swapping, and the impressive selection of RAID options is also welcome. However, it seems strange for VIA to choose a 10/100 Ethernet controller over the industry-standard Gigabit Ethernet speeds that are somewhat expected on an enthusiasts motherboard.