Soltek SL-K890Pro-939 Review - PAGE 1

It seems like it was only yesterday that Soltek's K8TPro-939 motherboard graced our test bench with its presence, yet we have already have another motherboard from Soltek ready to be put through its paces. Today's offering is the SL-K890Pro-939, which is, for all intents and purposes, the PCI-Express cousin of the K8TPro-939.

There is no doubt that PCI Express is geared to completely replace the almost-legacy AGP/PCI platforms, but it really is a double-edged sword. On one hand, PCI Express gives you a much-improved expansion bus, bragging rights, and a guaranteed upgrade path. On the other hand, there are still relatively very few PCI-Express-based products out there, and they are all priced at a premium, that you have to question whether or not you will see immediate substantial benefits from making the switch. Making the switch to PCI-Express not only entails the purchase of the actual motherboard, but a new video card as well. Unfortunately, many of us can afford to replace only one major system component at a time.

This brings us to a crossroads -- it really is a price vs. future benefit issue, since the performance benefits are almost nil at this point in time. While AGP/PCI-based motherboards are going to be available for a long time to come, sooner or later, finding hardware for such systems will become as difficult as it is finding a modern-GPU PCI video card. Sure, PCI video is still around, and I'm sure the same arguments were being thrown around when AGP was being introduced -- but good luck finding a PCI-based GeForce 4/5 nowadays that you won't pay a premium for. The same thing will happen to AGP eventually -- PCI-Express will be the norm, and AGP will be a fringe platform for those who are still stuck in the past. How soon this will happen I do not know, but it will.

While PCI-Express products are making their rounds, VIA K8T890-based boards are still quite scarce as it is, so we are happy to have one on hand today, as it will satisfy a number of our curiosities. Namely, we hope it will answer such questions as "Is there an immediate benefit to moving to a PCI-Express platform?", "What kind of performance gains can we see?", and "How does VIA's K8 PCI-Express implementation fair against the competition's, as well as its own K8 AGP implementation?" We hope to answer these questions, and more, in today's review.

In our previous review of the Soltek K8TPro-939, we touched on the importance of Socket 939 as the mainstream Athlon 64 socket, as well as Soltek as a provider of low-cost, high-quality components. We were very impressed with the performance, stability, and feature set of the K8TPro-939, and we commended Soltek's efforts by giving them our Value and Recommended awards for that product. Today's review is of a very similar board, both in terms of layout, feature set, and we hope performance, stability, and price. As we mentioned before, Soltek is a company to look out for, as they are steadily making a name for themselves with their very impressive, yet highly competitively-priced components.