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

Author: Dennis Garcia

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.

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

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

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 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.