Tuesday, December 07, 1999

Introduction

Founded in 1996, Soltek Computer Inc. is a professional motherboard manufacturer based in Taiwan. The majority of the members of their research & development team possess 15 years of experience in their respective fields. They possess headquarters located in Hsi-Chin, Taipei-Hsin, and a new fabrication plant located in Mariland, China. Soltek's total monthly production capacity stands at 100 000 motherboard units.

So goes the introduction. While young, this new enterprise is demonstrating a forward-looking personality. If fact, when I opened the box containing the SL-67KV motherboard, I was highly surprised. Not only did what I find exceed all former expectations and experience in terms of feature quantity, but also in quality...

As a fact, even the packaging impressed me as I've not seen many other manufacturers to take as much care in this regard as Soltek did. It doesn't end at the packaging, though! In the SL-67KV's box, as with all other Soltek supplied motherboards, is found a user's installation manual, an application installation manual for use with the included CD entitled, "Soltek 2-in-1 Bonus Pack" which contains Norton's Ghost and Norton Antivirus, an installation CD containing all the necessary drivers and such, a floppy disk drive cable, an 80-pin ATA66 IDE cable, and a thermal sensor. In my book, this is what I call meat around the bone and this is something for other manufacturers to think about; especially those who ship their boards without any packaging material... Well, that said, we'll now proceed to take a more detailed look at this very capable looking board. Let's find out a little more about this upstart manufacturer, by probing deep into the Soltek SL-67KV.

The Features

The SL-67KV's expansion possibilities are as such: 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, and 1 AGP port. Also, 3 168-pin DIMM sockets provide space for as much as 768MB of memory. I would guess that the last figure reflects the supposition of the user employing 256MB memory modules. Seeing as how 512MB modules are now available, however, I would suspect that it is possible to install 1.26GB of memory; supposing, of course, that socket #3 will only support 256MB, as is often the case. Bear in mind that the chipset itself can support up to 2GB of memory on board.

Configuration of the processor installed on the Soltek SL-67KV is done from the BIOS "Chipset Features Setup" menu for the clock frequency whilst the clock multiplier can be set via the SW1 block of DIP switches located on the motherboard itself. As concerns the latter option, it you remember, Intel has locked their processors multiplier (except for those preceding the PIII), so there is no need to bang your head in an attempt to change the multiplier value; the processor will only ignore this information anyway. Finally, interrupts DIP5 and DIP6, in conjunction with jumper JP3, allow the system bus frequency to be set. Available settings include: automatic adjustment by the system, 66Mhz, 100Mhz, and 133Mhz. Within the BIOS, it is also possible to set the operating frequency of the memory bus to a value equal to that of the system bus, and to add or subtract 33Mhz from that value.

An option also exists for altering the processor's core voltage. Available values include: +0.05 - +0.1 - +0.2 - +0.3 - +0.4 and -0.05 and -0.1 .

Available clock frequencies include (CPU/PCI) : 66/33, 75/37, 83/41MHz, 100/33, 103/34, 112/37, 124/31, 133/33, 140/35MHz, 150/37MHz, and clock multiplier values between 3X and 8X in steps of .5X.

Next: Additional Features.