Overclocking and final thoughts
OverclockingWith respect to enthusiasts, one of the nForce3 250Gb's main selling points has been in the supposed ability to lock PCI and AGP buses to user-defined levels. Locking these buses allows the enthusiast to manipulate driven clock speeds and multipliers for best performance and optimum overclocking. From our own S754 motherboard experiences, non-lockable AGP/PCI buses usually begin to impact on system stability at around 225-230MHz driven clock. Attempting to run higher frequencies than this can often lead to data corruption and possible graphics/OS failure.
Something's working right here. In fact, I was able to right the way up to 280MHz driven clock before any sign of system instability appeared. It shows that Soltek does indeed having working bus locks on K8AN2E-GR models. The problem then facing the enthusiast is in striking the right balance between driven clock and memory speeds/timings. It's likely that a lower memory speed ratio will be needed. Something along the lines of 5:4 (driven clock:memory).
Thoughts
Soltek has put together an impressive S754 package with its K8AN2E-GR motherboard. The intelligent board layout made installation simple. I especially like the way DIMM slots are orientated away from the AGP slot. Soltek has also done well on the feature count, adding in discrete SATA and IDE RAID through Promise's PCI-riding controller. Benchmark performance, too, was right on where I'd expect a well-tuned S754 board's to be, and the sample board overclocked like a champ.
There are quite a number of decent S754 motherboards crowding the marketplace right now. Soltek, I feel, has added to that crowd by producing a stable, solid board which is efficient in both form and performance. My only reservations lie with the recent release of the nForce4 core logic that supports PCI-Express right off the bat and in the difficulty in sourcing Soltek products in the U.K. If you can find it on sale soon, I'd definitely recommend putting it on a shortlist.
