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Overclocking

We managed to overclock the Soltek K8TPro-939 to a maximum stable speed of 255 MHz on the HT bus, with a memory divider of 1:1, HT multiplier of 4x, and CPU multiplier of 9x. These settings resulted in a total CPU clock of 2295 MHz, memory clock of 255 MHz, and HT bus clock of 1020 MHz. Unlike the 3901a, the SATA port on this particular board is locked and we experienced no problems with data integrity

Raising the FSB to 256 MHz caused instability very shortly after the initiation of any high-end test. An HT/FSB setting of 255 seems to be all that this board can take - impressive, considering the low price of the board.

Here are the SiSoft Sandra and Half-Life 2 results at our overclocked settings:

Overclocking the memory and CPU yielded an increase of approximately 1300 MB/sec in SiSoft Sandra's memory bandwidth benchmark. We used very high-end memory in order to attain a 255 MHz HT bus setting at a 1:1 memory divider. The memory itself is guaranteed to run at up to 263 MHz, but as we mentioned, the board was limited to 255 MHz. Most people would probably have to increase the memory divider in order to achieve even 255 MHz anyway, and thus would not see much benefit in memory bandwidth tests.

Half-Life 2, being an extremely CPU-dependant benchmark, gained almost 18 FPS when the CPU was running at 255 * 9, proving that the game thrives on raw CPU power. Had we run this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and higher (we run all games at 640x480 to test CPU performance), there would have been less of a bump.

Conclusion

Soltek's K8TPro-939 was an absolute pleasure to work with. It manages to come in at a low price point (around 100$ US based on a 120$ Canadian price) yet offer a full feature set that rivals high end boards of many other companies. The K8TPro-939 was a snap to set up, performed admirably, was entirely stable all throughout testing, and the overclocking ability was not too shabby either allowing for the FSB to hit 255.

Soltek has struck a very good balance between affordability and features. Don't get us wrong, though - this board certainly does not lack features. Expansion will never be a problem with the SL-K8TPro-939, nor will CPU or RAM upgrades: four SATA ports, three IDE ports, two Firewire ports, eight USB ports, five PCI slots, and four DIMM slots are about as much as anyone can possibly need. With the future-proof Socket 939, you can rest assured that the very same board will be good for Athlon 64s yet to be made.

The K8TPro-939's BIOS is fairly robust, giving you a wide variety of control over the voltages, buses, and multipliers/dividers of the entire platform. One thing we'd like to see improved is the amount of control over the RAM. The BIOS as it is right now only allows tuning of the CAS latency, divider, and 1T/2T timing. We were able to stably reach an FSB of 255 MHz with a memory divider of 1:1, memory timing of 1T, and CPU multiplier of 9x, giving us a total clock speed of 2295 MHz.

Overall, Soltek has put together a very nice and affordable board. It is highly recommended that you look into this product if you're in the market for a Socket 939 system, but don't want to break the bank on the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink motherboards out there while still opening the door for future upgrades and a bit of overclocking.