SOLTEK - Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR nForce3 250Gb Motherboard Review

The board under review is another member of the "Black Thunder" series from Soltek, the SL-K8AN2E-GR. This board comes equipped with the nVidia nForce3-250Gb chipset and support for all types of 754pin Athlon64 processors. As with all Black Thunder boards the PCB is a glossy jet-black can comes with purple expansion slots.

. . . Using this motherboard was a real joy, installation and setup went very smooth and after some minor BIOS configurations the board was up and really to run. The synthetic benchmarks didn’t show any clear winner between the nF3-150 and nF3-250Gb but when it came to real-world performance the SL-K8AN2E-GR and XFX FX5700 Ultra combo did find a way to edge out on top.

Overclocking on this board was somewhat of a disappointment though it is hard to pinpoint where the problem was. I suspect that our processor could have been damaged in an unrelated incident but the beta BIOS could have also been an overriding factor.

The Good Things
Black Thunder Color scheme w/ Black PCB
Color Matched Cables
Memory slots across the top of the motherboard
Dual Onboard Serial ATA RAID Controllers
Great BIOS Controls
USB 2.0 Connectivity
Gigabit LAN
The Bad Things
Location of MCP limits cooling possibilities with longer PCI cards
Very limited CPU voltage settings
Overclocking on our sample wasn’t that great
Ninjalane Rating 5 / 5

Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR Motherboard Review @ Ninjalane