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Installation

Installation of the Soltek K8TPro-939 was relatively painless (as far as motherboards go, of course). The most troublesome parts of any motherboard installation are usually the routing and tucking away of cables, as well as the connection of the front panel buttons and LEDs - both of which were completely scot-free.

As mentioned, the main ATX power connector is located in the far upper-right-hand corner of the board, allowing for the hiding of the fat ATX cable. The front panel pin headers were simple and very clearly labeled, avoiding the need to look in the manual for the correct pin-out.

There is over an inch of room available between the clips of the DIMM slots and the AGP card, allowing for completely effortless removal and addition of RAM.

Soltek's Pro lineup of motherboards also includes a LED counter that spits out a diagnostic code in the event that there is a problem. The back of the motherboard manual gives a long list of codes and associated problems. We would encourage Soltek to expand upon some of the explanations in the manual though as some of the error descriptions are not the most intuitive. However, the numeric code approach is much better than the traditional LED pattern or beep codes used by most other boards.

Benchmark Setup

Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 2x512 MB OCZ PC4200 RAM
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600 GT 128 MB AGP
• Soltek QBIC 3901a (VIA K8T800 Pro)*

* For reference

Drivers used for testing included Forceware 66.93 and VIA Hyperion 4.55vp1.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• Business Winstone 2004
• HDTach
• NTTCP
• LAME MP3
• Rightmark Audio
• SiSoft Sandra
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• Halo
• Half-Life 2
• Call of Duty
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• X2 Rolling Demo