After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain.  I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain.  If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration. 

Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com

  • reviews
  • motherboards
  • Soltek SL-K8AN-RL 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review
  • Soltek SL-K8AN-RL 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review

    Author:
    Published:

    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
    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
    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.