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Overclocking

We managed to overclock the Soltek K890Pro-939 to an amazing maximum stable speed of 280 MHz on the HT bus, with a memory divider of 6:5 (166 MHz), HT multiplier of 4x, and CPU multiplier of 8x. These settings resulted in a total CPU clock of 2240 MHz, memory clock of ~233 MHz, and HT bus clock of 1120 MHz. The SATA1/2 ports appear to be locked, as we did not experience any problems with data integrity. We did not test SATA 3/4 (powered by the Promise controller).

The maximum attained CPU and memory clocks are of little concern, as these are out of the equation when overclocking a motherboard. With the 6:5 memory divider, our OCZ PC4200 EL Platinum Edition RAM still had about 30 MHz of headway before we would have reached its limit, and our Winchester 3000+ has a pre-determined maximum stable clock of ~2460 MHz, leaving 220 MHz of headway.

Raising the Soltek's HT/"FSB" to 281 MHz resulted in errors very shortly into a Prime95 session. Turning down the HT multiplier to 3x did nothing to ease its troubles. We can quite comfortably state that 280 MHz seems to be the fastest that this board can handle -- an impressive feat.

Conclusion

We liked Soltek's K8TPro-939 very much. We liked the K890Pro-939 even more. Soltek has done an outstanding job with their first PCI-Express board, bringing extreme performance, stability, features, and overclockability to the table while other manufacturers still struggle to get a PCI-Express product out. From start to finish, this board did not give us any troubles -- it was set up with ease and worked flawlessly from the moment we turned it on and then all throughout our testing.

Knowing Soltek, this board will likely be priced very competitively with the other Socket 939/PCI-Express boards out there, possibly even being priced the lowest. If that is the case once again, then Soltek will have struck an unsurpassable balance between affordability and features. Motherboards these days can come with nearly nothing, or everything and a bag of chips -- Soltek has done exceptionally well and provided the consumer with all of the core features necessary for an enthusiast, and a bit more, but not so much that you feel like all of the engineering has gone into packing as many things into the board as possible.

A lot of good work has gone into the K890Pro-939's BIOS. We only had one complaint with the K8TPro-939's BIOS, and that was the lack of memory tuning options -- Soltek has answered this complaint and provided options that rival the BIOS flexibility of the established big names in overclocking. In addition to the extreme customizability of RAM timings, the robust BIOS also allows you to tweak a wide variety of bus, voltage, and multiplier/divider options. After some tuning, we were able to reach a maximum stable HT/"FSB" clock of 280 MHz, which is definitely among the ranks of the high-end boards of established manufacturers.

To conclude, I have to say that this is probably my most favourite board in the lab right now. Working with it from the first day it was brought to life to the last day of testing was a complete delight. While most motherboards have at least one or two funny quirks that take adjusting to, the Soltek K890-Pro was flawless. This is a no-nonsense product made by a reputable manufacturer who is making a name for itself in the business. Giving the K890Pro-939 an Editor's Choice Award was a complete no-brainer.