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The Soltek K890Pro-939 makes use of a fairly standard Award BIOS, with a healthy dose overclocking features thrown in. Soltek's previous Socket 939 board, the K8TPro-939, features somewhat of a basic BIOS, but it was by no means disappointing. Soltek seems to have thrown in everything and the kitchen sink into their K890Pro-939 BIOS.

One of Soltek's advertised features is the "SmartDoc Anti-Burn Shield", which we assume to be some form of over-heating protection. The BIOS screen of the same name is merely a detailed hardware information screen, showing temperatures, voltages, and RPMs.

On the overclocking front, Soltek has answered the beck and call of many enthusiasts, and included modifiable options for the CPU multiplier, HyperTransport bus speed, Vcore, VDIMM, PCI-Express bus speed, and options to enable/disable the asynchronous operation of the PCI and PCI-Express buses.

Quite possibly one of our only complaints with the K8TPro-939 was that it was very limited in how you could tweak your memory. Soltek has answered this need, and included more options we could ever possibly need.

The K890Pro-939 now provides us with options for the memory divider ratio, CAS latency, minimum RAS active time, RAS to CAS delay, row precharge time, row to row delay, row cycle time, row refresh cycle time, 1T/2T timings, read preamble, asynchronous latency, and two other options we are not familiar with. The sheer immensity of the amount of control given is impressive. Based on our experiences with the previous Soltek board, we are extremely encouraged that they have taken the criticism to heart and have addressed concerns that may have kept some enthusiasts away from some of their previous offerings.

Adjustable ranges for the various overclocking options are as follows:

• CPU multiplier is adjustable in whole-number increments only, from 4x to the highest unlocked multiplier available with your Athlon 64 (9x for our 3000+), up to a possible maximum of 20x
• HT bus frequency ("FSB") is adjustable from 200 MHz to 300 MHz in 1 MHz increments
• Vcore is adjustable from 0.800V to 1.55V in 0.025V increments
• DIMM voltage is adjustable from 2.6V to 2.75V in 0.05V increments
• HT bus width options are 8-bit and 16-bit
• HT bus multiplier options are 1 GHz (5x), 800 MHz (4x), 600 MHz (3x), 400 MHz (2x), and 200 MHz (1x)
• PCI-Express bus frequency is adjustable from 100 MHz to 150 MHz in 1 MHz increments
• CAS latency options are 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0
• Minimum RAS active time (Tras) options are Auto, and 5T to 15T
• RAS to CAS delay (Trcd) options are Auto, and 2T to 7T
• Row precharge time (Trp) options are Auto, and 2T to 7T
• Row to row delay (Trcd) options are Auto, 2T to 4T
• Row cycle time (Trc) options are 7T to 22T
• Row refresh cycle time (Trfc) options are 9T to 24T
• Timing options of 1T and 2T
• Read preamble options of 2.0 ns to 9.5 ns in 0.5 ns increments
• Asynchronous latency options of 2 ns to 11 ns in 1.0 ns increments

This is truly an amazing BIOS, rivaling almost the highest-end of enthusiast boards. No complaints here whatsoever -- you should be able to squeeze every ounce of performance from your CPU and RAM with a motherboard like this.

Some of the remaining unvisited options: