Tuesday, July 09, 2002

Introduction

Soltek, a company that has been in business since 1996, operates holdings that produce more than 300 000 motherboards per day.

While their boards have never stood toe-to-toe with their counterparts from Abit and Asus, at least in the Overclocking arena, Soltek's products have made aggressive in-roads into the market due to their low price and many extras.

The SL-85DR2 that we'll be testing today is based on the Intel 845E chipset, which was designed to support Pentium 4 chips with 533MHz FSBs. Unlike other manufacturers, Soltek has not tinkered with the i845E's settings in order to support DDR333 memory. Rather, they have stuck to the specifications, and included only the recommended support for DDR200, and DDR266.

The SL-85DR2 comes with very little standard equipment. In fact, its only notable hardware "extra" is a 6-channel sound-card. On the other hand, a second rendition of the same board -- the SL-85DR2+L -- includes both the sound-card, a LAN controller, and a RAID 0+1 controller.

In short, like most of Soltek's offerings, the SL-85DR2 is a mid-range product who's most selling feature is its generous software bundle.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Audio

The Soltek SL-85DR2's audio circuitry is based around a Realtek ALC650 sound-chip. The ALC650 supports AC3, and 5.1 Surround Sound, and allows users to hook-in up to six audio channels, including a center base channel.

From a fidelity standpoint, the Realtek AL650 is quite good at what it does -- despite being somewhat inferior to the C-Media CMI 8738 chip -- and should satisfy most users.

Configuration

Configuration of the Soltek SL-85DR2 is pretty simple, though its circuitry is peppered with a number of jumpers; most users will be able to get by simply by accessing the BIOS.

On the board itself, users will find jumpers "JP18", "JAGP", and "JP3" and "JP4" to be of the most interest. There can be used to force the FSB to 533MHz, alter the AGP voltage, and alter the DRAM voltage respectively

Within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" BIOS menu, a few Overclocking features can also be found, though they are not very numerous.

For example, users are presented with an option allowing them to increase the FSB frequency in 1MHz increments.

The clock multiplier setting can also be changed, though this feature is only useful to those who posess a P4 without a multiplier lock.

The Vcore voltage can also be set to any of the values indicated by the table above.

And, as expected, the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu presents a number of options related to memory timing, including the ability to allow the system to automatically determine the proper memory speed via "Serial Presence Detect".

Next: Technical details

Soltek SL-85DR2