There’s no denying that the Pentium4 has taken the speed crown away from the Athlon during the last few months. This isn’t the least bit surprising as the Pentium4 is now a matured product whereas the Athlon XP is almost at the end of its life-cycle. Its going to replaced by the Athlon64 in September and along with the new CPU, we’ll see new chipsets by companies like VIA, SiS and nVidia. While we wont find out the exact performance of the new CPU/Chipset combos until we’re presented with the final silicon, we can somewhat predict with what we have on our hands today- the ASUS nForce3 based SK8N motherboard and an Opteron 242 (1.6GHz) CPU.

The BIOS on the board we’ve received is beta and we’re working with ASUS to report and solve problems, so this is by no means a full blooded review. Instead, this is just a little sharing of information. We will look at the board and the benchmarks in more detail in the next few days. Until that is done, enjoy this little preview of the SK8N by ASUS.