Soltek SL-K8AN-RL 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review

The Soltek K8AN-RL is not unlike the other Soltek motherboards that we have seen. The board has been designed for a mainstream computer user looking for a quick and easy way to move to the Athlon64 platform. The board provides just about everything that any mainstream user could want at only a fraction of the cost.

Using this motherboard was a real joy, installation and setup went really smooth and after some minor BIOS configurations the board was up and really to run. The default benchmarks didn't show any clear winner between the SL-K8AN-RL and Chaintech reference system. Out of the box, the Soltek board did show slightly higher synthetic scores and realworld scores and even though the board doesn't have a wide range of overclocking controls it still hit 223Mhz FSB without to much trouble. Granted, the choosen system memory was swapped out to make this happen but the minor boost in speed was nice to see.

The Soltek SL-K8AN-RL is a perfect solution for any Athlon64 hungry system builder on a budget.

Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.

Great Value and Performance
Black Thunder Color scheme w/ Black PCB
Color Matched Cables
Memory slots across the top of the motherboard
Onboard SerialATA and SerialATA RAID
USB 2.0 Connectivity
Onboard LAN

Location of MCP limits cooling possibilities with longer PCI cards
Very limited voltage and clock controls
Lack of PCI Clock Control

I would like to thank Soltek for helping to make this review possible.