Soltek EQ3901A - A Top Barebone for Athlon 64

Bundle and brief specification of the barebone-kit

Package content has never been the most advantageous side of Soltek Qbic: it cannot be considered rich by modern standards. The bundle of additional accessories is scarce as well, but the attention to minor details is pleasing. In particular, the bundle includes strips of insulation mylar to stick to places of possible undesirable contact between the expansion cards and the PC case or disk drives. (By the way, large dimensions of a PCI-card may result not only in touching the drive cage but also in making it impossible to install a drive into the bottom 5-inch bay.) And of course we can't help mentioning the rucksack, which accommodates so well the assembled system.

In conclusion we provide a brief specification of the barebone-kit, which comes shipped in a nice cardboard box with a handle.

• Bundle: PC case, power supply unit, motherboard, CPU cooler, CD, manuals, two "narrow" shielded cables (ATA66 and FDD), two SATA cables and a power converter for such hard disks, power cable, screws, cable clips, a strip of insulation mylar, rucksack to carry the kit
• PC case format: "brick"
• PC case dimensions (WxDxH): 215x330x200 mm
• Bays: 1 x internal and 1 x external 3.5", 2 x external 5,25"
• Power supply unit: Soltek PSU300AS (Seasonic 300PFD-APFC), 300 W (designation)
• Mainboard, chipset: Soltek B9D-FGR, VIA K8T800 Pro (K8T800Pro+VT8237)
• Video: no integrated video
• Audio: AC'97 Realtek ALC850 codec
• Network: 10/100/1000 Mbit/sec Gigabit Ethernet, Realtek RTL8110S
• Expansion slots: 1 x AGP (for full sized cards that take up only one slot) and 1 x PCI (for short or low-profile cards)
• Front panel connectors: S/PDIF-Out (Toslink), 2 x Audio (microphone / head phones), 2 x USB (2.0), 1 x FireWire
• Back panel connectors: 2 x PS/2, 2 x COM, 4 x USB (2.0), 1 x FireWire, 1 x LAN, 5 x Audio
• BIOS capacities for finetuning/overclocking: timings and memory operating frequency, FSB frequency, fix AGP/PCI dividers, voltage on the CPU, memory, and AGP

Performance tests

Testbed configuration:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, Socket 939
• Motherboards:
  • MSI K8T Neo2-FIR based on VIA K8T800 Pro
  • Soltek B9D-FGR based on VIA K8T800 Pro chipset as part of Soltek EQ3901A

• Memory: 2x512 MB PC4300(DDR533) DDR SDRAM DIMM Kingston, CL 2.5
• External video card: Manli ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB
• HDD: Western Digital WD360 (SATA), 10000 rpm

Software:

• OS and drivers:
  • Windows XP Professional SP2
  • DirectX 9.0c
  • VIA Hyperion 4.53
  • Silicon Image SATA RAID 1.0.0.51
  • ATI Catalyst 4.11

• Test applications:
  • 7-Zip 4.10b
  • WinRAR 3.41
  • Doom 3 (v1.0.1282)

Perhaps our constant readers have a crystal clear idea what they can see in the section devoted to performance tests of two systems with Socket 939. Indeed, performance of different chipsets (not even different motherboards) for 64-bit AMD processors practically matches, the differences may appear only when it's impossible to set minimum timings for one of the systems. There were no such problems in this case, Soltek B9D-FGR and a random motherboard taken for comparison (MSI K8T Neo2-FIR) managed to startup with minimum timings (for the selected memory modules). We publish some of the test results, but they just confirm the above said.

As Soltek EQ3901A lacks internal video, it's impossible to answer the burning question whether the integrated video is enough to play games – in this case you may choose what video card you need. We feel quite confident in recommending that you should use 3Digest for this purpose.

Sergei Pikalov (peek@ixbt.com) January 17, 2005