 |
|
Soltek
SL-75MRN-L - Up Close and Personal |
|
Under the Hood |
|
The
Bundle
There's a lot to
consider when choosing a motherboard for your system.
Although this may seem a little foolish, the packaging a
product arrives in, can certainly make or break first
impression about it. The packaging that the Soltek
motherboard arrived in is as about as professional looking
as you can expect. To us, it's just like making a
presentation in your career; if you presentation is junk,
then no one will buy into your ideas. Whereas, if the
presentation is well though out and put together, then
people are more likely to jump on your bandwagon.
Well, upon first sight of this Soltek product, we were very
impressed.
There's not a
whole lot to find inside the packaging. Two ribbon
cables, one for a floppy drive and one for a harddrive, an
I/O panel cover, and an extra serial port. There is a
case badge in there as well. Also in the box, are the
user manuals and two CD's. One CD is the driver CD for
the motherboard, while the other CD contains a handful of
popular utilities, that many users will find extremely
useful. The software contained on the CD is Trend
Mark's PC-cillin 2002 & PC-cillin 2000 anti-virus software.
Another title is Far Stone's VirtualDrive 7, which can be
used to emulate a physical CD-ROM drive, on your hard drive.
This allows you to create several virtual CD-ROM's which are
all playable at once. Still another title is Far
Stone's RestoreIT! 3 Lite, which allows you to recover
files, system configurations, and even the operating system
you are running. But wait there's more!
PowerQuest's Partition Magic 6.0 SE makes an appearance and
which most of you already know is used to manage drive
partitions from Windows. Finally, there is
PowerQuest's Drive Image 4.0, which is cloning software
enabling the user to backup and recover hard disk data.
Wow, what a great selection of software bundled with this
motherboard. Soltek claims this software to be valued
at $325 USD, which they throw in for free. In any
event, it's easy to see that most of these software titles
will come in handy and really are added bonus. One of
the most significant parts of the bundle, in our opinion,
was Soltek's claim that the CPU "is free from overheating
under any circumstance". How can they guarantee that?
They provide this little extra which they like to call ABS
II CPU Protection. The ABS stands for Anti-Burn Shield
and works by shutting down the CPU if it ever gets over 85°
C.
ABS II
CPU Protection
In the screen
shot above we see Soltek's Hardware monitor software.
This software monitors temperature of the CPU die as well as
fan speeds and voltages. The software allows you to
set alarms, in the event temperatures or fan speeds get out
of whack. WIth know with the high popularity of
overclocking today, one can never be too careful and having
software that monitors the health of your system is a must
in any system. Another nice touch added to the bundle
by Soltek.
Under The Scope: Layout and Features
The Soltek
SL-75MRN-L motherboard sports impressive features any end
user would like to see on today's motherboards.
Pictured above
we have the motherboard fresh out of its packaging.
Something we've rarely seen before are the stickers on the
major parts of the motherboard explaining what each slot is
for. This is a nice touch, especially if the end user
is venturing down the build-it-yourself path for the first
time. The PCB is a gold color while the PCI slots are
done in yellow. All in all I would say that this board
looks very good and it's nice to see a motherboard
manufacturer stray from the crowd now again when it comes to
styling the motherboard.
The layout of
the board is fairly straight forward and did not pose any
problems. Of course there was one gripe that we see on
almost every motherboard today, and that is the fact that
memory modules cannot be moved around while a video card is
in the AGP slot. The Northbridge IGP chipset is cooled
by a gold heatsink and fan. Definitely a nice touch,
as we've seen today's chipsets running at higher
temperatures all the time. A thermal paste is used as
the compound between the heatsink and IGP. As you can
see there are only two UATA IDE connectors, a primary and
secondary. This board does not offer SATA support or
RAID support of any kind. There are two USB 2.0
headers on the board which will give you an additional 4 USB
2.0 ports for a total of 6. There are 2 USB 2.0 ports
on the back I/O panel. Also on the back I/O panel we
see the game port and 6-channel sound connectors as well as
an RJ-45 LAN jack and the USB 2.0 ports. Also you'll
find the VGA connector, parallel port, serial connector and
the PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse. One
other feature to point out is the fact that there is not
much space for a larger after-market HSF around the CPU
socket. The board layout and quality all rate
top-notch in our book. Let's fire up this motherboard
and see what the BIOS has to offer.
The
BIOS
The Soltek
SL-75MRN-L motherboard uses the AWARD Bios and the
screenshots below give a glimpse into what it offers.
The upper right
screen is the Advanced Chipset Settings, where the FSB
frequency and memory frequency are adjusted. There are
four settings to set both the memory and system performance
at: Optimal, Aggressive, Turbo, and Expert. Depending
on which selection is made, will allow for more settings to
be adjustable. Selecting the Expert setting allows the
user to adjust every configurable setting. The FSB is
adjustable all the way up to 200MHz in 1MHz increments and
then has three more settings of 204MHz, 207MHz, and 211MHz
FSB. All memory settings are adjustable such as CAS
Latency, T(RAS), T(RCD), T(RP), and also the frequency,
which has settings such as By SPD, 100%, 125%, 133% and even
as high as 200% to get the most out of your memory.
As you probably
are aware, boosting your FSB frequency and memory frequency,
usually requires a little extra juice. The BIOS allows
for quite a few voltage tweaks. The CPU vcore is
adjustable up to 1.85v in 0.25v increments. The AGP
voltage is also adjustable and has four settings: 1.5v -
1.8V in 0.1v increments. Also in the menu is the DIMM
voltage. A range of 2.5v all the way up to 2.8v is
allowed to be sent to the DIMM's. Another voltage
adjustment is to the VDD and that has three settings: 1.6v,
1.7v, and 1.8v. Lastly, we have the CPU Ratio menu for
all those out there with an unlocked CPU. The CPU
ratio has a range of a 5.0 multiplier all the way to an 18
multiplier. Having a CPU ratio menu is key for finding
the sweet spot for both the CPU and memory when overclocking
and overall system performance. One other choice from
the main menu is "SmartDoc Anti-Burn Shield" which allows
the user to pick the temperature at which the system will
shutdown. There are six different selections in here
starting at 75°C and ending at 100°C in 5°C
increments. A nice feature to say the least, just in
case that heatsink fan decides to take a vacation someday.
To sum it up, this is a feature filled BIOS and has all the
means necessary to achieve some good overclocking results.
Speaking of which, let's take a look to see how this board
performs.
Setup
and Benchmarking
|
