As mentioned earlier the
layout on the Soltek is simply awesome. Gone are the days of
removing your memory to install a graphics card and vice versa. No
longer will you have to manipulate your ATX PSU cable around your
CPU cooler, and make sure you have a 18in floppy cable.
This has been a typical problem area, but
with the Soltek you won't have to worry about removing anything to
install something. There is an abundance of room around every
component that can be taxed and heated up which means good stability
so long as you have some case cooling to help out.
The VIA chipset is pretty obvious here. We had no problems with the
onboard audio of the K8TPro.
The K8TPro does a good job of pasting
its chipset cooler, but with no fan it's going to be relying on your
case cooling to be a stable overclocker. Of course that's mainly
theory, but why take the risk to only find out afterwards? We took
precautions and mounted a Micro Cool chipset cooler on the Soltek
board before we even lit it up.
This should be a factory option on every 939 motherboard.
The K8T800 Pro chipset from VIA may be
inferior to the NF-3 ultra chipset when it comes to benchmarking a
939, but in this case we were quite surprised at how well the Soltek
performed once the BIOS was optimized. In our eyes the K8T800 Pro
chipset is a really good chipset, and is extremely stable under
stressful conditions. Once overclocked it performs really well under
a mild overclock. If I were to describe what that means it would be
saying the NF-3 has more horsepower, whereas the VIA has more grunt.
The phase arrangement appears to be three
phase given the number of mosfets on the motherboard. We cooled
these too with a sink kit we had lying around. The cooling of your
components is very important in overclocking instances, and the
Soltek gets extra points in that department due to the amount of
space given around the components that will heat up the most.
The VIA southbridge does most of the duty on
939 boards (754 too). Notice the LED diagnostic display. I have
grown to love these displays since you no longer have to run a
speaker to read beep codes in case something goes wrong. You just
look up the code(s) being displayed and look them up in the
motherboard manual or "board book". Notice the three SATA headers,
the two in conjunction with one another operate from the VIA SATA
RAID, and the single one is for the Promise SATA/RAID. The second
Promise SATA header is located by the yellow IDE header.
The second Promise SATA/RAID header is
located underneath the Soltek BIOS ROM.
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