Soltek SL-K8AV-R 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review

Serious Sam is a great FPS game that brings back many things that made FPS fun, TONS of things to shoot!! Even with conservative settings this game will tax even the fastest of computers.

I used the default fresh installed settings for this benchmark. If you'd like to do your own Serious Sam demo benchmark bring down the console and type "dem_bProfile=1" (w/out quotes), exit the console then choose a demo from the main menu. When the demo is complete pull down the console again to see your score.

Serious Sam: Second Encounter.

My personal favorite, Quake 3. We used the high-quality settings with the resolution set at 1024x768 32-bit color.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein. For this benchmark we used a multi-player demo called checkpoint. If you wish to try the demo out for yourself it can be downloaded from the following website or ask me and I'll send you a copy.

Unreal Tournament 2003. UT2003 comes with a built in benchmarking tool that will run a series of botmatch timedemos and record the scores for you. The benchmark was run in the default configuration.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Premiere 6.0, Macromedia Director 8.5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055, Netscape 6.2.3, NewTek's LightWave 7.5, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0.

Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word), Microsoft Project 2000, Lotus Notes, WinZip 8.0, Norton AntiVirus, and Netscape Communicator.

This is bringing back memories of AthlonXP processors on the nForce2, all of the benchmark numbers are the same. Given processor speed and how the benchmarks were setup this is not to be unexpected. All of the realworld benchmarks were configured to put most of the burden onto the processor and chipset removing any video card dependency from the equation. Since the memory controller is integrated into the processor the only thing that would have swayed the numbers had been purposefully removed.