Test Setup

Soltek SL-K890Pro-939: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ASUS AX800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.1, VIA Hyperion 4.55.

Soltek EQ3901-300P: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ATI Radeon X800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.1, VIA Hyperion 4.55.

MSI K8N Neo2: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ATI Radeon X800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.1, NVIDIA Unified 5.10.

MSI K8T Neo2: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ATI Radeon X800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.1, VIA Hyperion 4.55.

Going up the Soltek SL-K890Pro-939 will be a SFF motherboard , and a couple full size motherboards. The MSI K8T Neo2 and Soltek EQ3901-300P share the same K8T800 Pro chipset, whereas the K8N Neo2 uses the NVIDIA nForce 3. The setups all share the same peripheral components, except the SL-K890Pro-939 will be using an ASUS PCI Express X800 XT, while the other three will be using an AGP X800 XT. Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all the boards, but not used during game testing.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004 -A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests, higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2003 & 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

All four boards are more or less on par with one another, especially in the case of memory performance. Given that AMD integrated the memory controller on the CPU die, there will be marginal differences in the benchmarks. For the CPU tests, the Soltek SL-K890Pro-939 places around the middle of the pack, but we're talking mere percentage points here.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004

Both Soltek boards finish #1 and #2, with the SL-K890Pro-939 grabbing top spot in the Business benchmark. All three K8T8xx boards were close, while the nForce 3 a little further behind.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation

Same trends with the Sysmark benchmarks, though this time the SL-K890Pro-939 is the clear winner across all the tests. What we can conclude up to now is that for synthetic and real-world scripts, the SL-K890Pro-939 is a solid offering, but let's see how it fares in real-world benchmarks.

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