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Soltek SL-K8AN-RL 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Benchmarks - Synthetic
For this round of benchmarking I will be using the Chaintech ZNF3-150 nForce3-150 motherboard as reference. Since the two boards in question are using the same nForce3 chipset we can expect to see similar scores across the board.
The system as it was tested
Soltek K8AN-RL nForce3
Athlon64 3200+ 1MB L2 Cache
AMD OEM Heatsink
2x Corsair XMS3200LL ProSeries DDR400 512megs (2326)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
IBM Hitachi Deskstar 80gig SerialATA 7200RPM
Antec 430watt power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
Athlon64 3200+ 1MB L2 Cache
AMD OEM Heatsink
2x Corsair XMS3200LL ProSeries DDR400 512megs (2326)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
IBM Hitachi Deskstar 80gig SerialATA 7200RPM
Antec 430watt power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
Reference System
Chaintech ZNF3-150 nForce3
Athlon64 3200+ 1MB L2 Cache
AMD OEM Heatsink
2x Corsair XMS3200LL ProSeries DDR400 512megs (2326)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Western Digital Caviar SE 80GB ATA/100 HDD
Antec 430watt power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
Athlon64 3200+ 1MB L2 Cache
AMD OEM Heatsink
2x Corsair XMS3200LL ProSeries DDR400 512megs (2326)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Western Digital Caviar SE 80GB ATA/100 HDD
Antec 430watt power supply
12x/40x DVD/CDRom
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
CPU-Z
SiSoft Sandra
Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks
that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers change depending on what version you have installed, these were
recorded using Sandra Professional Version 2004.10.9.89
A couple of major factors control memory bandwidth, memory clock speed and how wide the pipe is. In this case the pipe is single channel. On a side note the memory scores shown here are exactly what you would find on an nForce2 system running at 200Mhz FSB.
Cachemem
Cachemem is a synthetic benchmark used to test bandwidth and latency.
Penny pinchers will look at these numbers and say that clearly the winner is the SL-K8AN-RL but remember that these tests are synthetic and the K8AN-RL is running a slightly higher FSB.
