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Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Conclusion

This is the first nForce3-250Gb motherboard to be tested here in the Ninjalane Labs and though it is clearly designed for mainstream use it also has enough features to satisfy many power users as well.

Using this motherboard was a real joy, installation and setup went very smooth and after some minor BIOS configurations the board was up and really to run. The synthetic benchmarks didn't show any clear winner between the nF3-150 and nF3-250Gb but when it came to real-world performance the SL-K8AN2E-GR and XFX FX5700 Ultra combo did find a way to edge out on top.

Overclocking on this board was somewhat of a disappointment though it is hard to pinpoint where the problem was. I suspect that our processor could have been damaged in an unrelated incident but the beta BIOS could have also been an overriding factor.

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

The Good Things

Black Thunder Color scheme w/ Black PCB
Color Matched Cables
Memory slots across the top of the motherboard
Dual Onboard Serial ATA RAID Controllers
Great BIOS Controls
USB 2.0 Connectivity
Gigabit LAN

The Bad Things

Location of MCP limits cooling possibilities with longer PCI cards
Very limited CPU voltage settings
Overclocking on our sample wasn't that great

Ninjalane Rating

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