Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 Review

The growing trend for motherboard mfgs is to create something that makes their product stand out from everybody else. Soltek has done this by taking their high end products and include features that many hardware enthusiasts are looking for. While I have normally frowned on boards with tons of onboard stuff it's good to know that 9 times out of 10 everything can be disabled with a simple flip of a bios setting. Soltek has also been fairly well known for their unique spin on overclocking. While overclocking is hit or miss on any hardware platform having the controls handy makes things a lot easier.

We had high hopes going into our first 939 enabled Athlon64 motherboard review and while the Soltek SL-K8Tpro-939 did deliver average performance across the board it's still just "average". If you combine these performance metrics with some of the strange but tolerable layout conditions you come up with a rather mixed bag of conclusions to ponder over.

Overclocking on the SL-K8Tpro-939 was fairly straightforward and didn't differ much from any other Athlon64. The Soltek BIOS on our board was somewhat limiting in that it lacked memory-timing controls and included some rather confusing menu selections. To finally attain the 230Mhz FSB overclock the LDT speed was reduced to help with system stability and the memory clock was set to DDR333 speeds. Sadly the processor seemed to want to run much faster though due to issues related to I/O transfers the FSB had to be reduced.

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

Black Thunder Color scheme w/ Black PCB
Athlon 939 Processor Support
Color Matched Cables
Gigabit LAN
Onboard Firewire

Board Layout Issues
Tempermental Overclocking
Average Performance

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