Super PI & Hexus PiFast

Synthetic Gaming Performance (courtesy of Futuremark Inc)

Gaming Performance (no AA or AF, 1024x768, max quality)

Overall Thoughts

     One aspect that was odd about the Soltek K890Pro-939 was a characteristic that we have witnessed on all 939 boards that we've come across thus far. Close attention to a 939 board's BIOS is so important to illustrate to those new to this platform. Studying the motherboard manual, hanging out and asking questions, just generally using good valid resources to get your system where you want it to is our best recommendation. Once you achieve the kind of performance you want for a 939 platform you will be duly rewards with excellent performance, and impressive numbers. It was so very easy for us to draw conclusions that this board had problems, but it really was just a problem with patience. You just can't expect to manipulate the FSB and voltages to expect a good overclock. A 939 platform requires much more than that, and after a few days of tinkering we really found out that VIA has a good leash on harnessing a 939's potential.

     Voltages are direly needed with the K890. If proper voltages were implemented into this board we would have no choice but to give it a perfect '10'. If you check out our overall overclock on this board and compare it to the K8TPro, you'll notice the level of overclock is nearly identical. The difference was due to the lack of a decent vcore option that the K8TPro had (1.70 vs 1.55). Soltek is already working on that, and even sent us a beat BIOS to test that had the 1.7, but our OEM HSF just wasn't up to the task. As for PCI-E, as of now you cannot ignore it, but it is a real shame to see vendors charging outrageous prices for the same AGP versions of cards. I would like to think that nVidia and ATI would put a stop to this, but I have yet to see it happen. Other than that, we would definitely recommend the K890 for your 939 needs.

Club Overclocker Rating
Innovation:	8.0 out of 10
Performance:	9.5 out of 10
Quality:	10 out of 10
Stability:	10 out of 10
Overclocking:	7.5 out of 10
Software Pack:	10 out of 10
Value:	10 out of 10
Overall Rating 9.0
Skill Level
Project Skill Level (10 being hardest)	4 out of 10