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Soltek
SL-75DRV5 KT333 Motherboard - Page 2
31-May-2002 - Review by James "Agg"
Rolfe
In the Box:
The same impressive shiny
box as used for their SL-85DRS2 and SL-75DRV4 is present again.
Inside, there's a USB header with 2 more ports, one floppy cable,
one 80-pin (ATA66/100/33) IDE cable and a remote thermal diode.
Given that the motherboard can read the internal thermal diode
of Palomino-or-later CPU's, the probe could be used for measuring
temperature of older CPU's or the back of your video card etc.
There's an impressive software bundle included: full versions
of PC-Cillin 2000 (antivirus), Virtual Drive 6 (cd-emulation software),
Partition Magic 6.0SE (partition management) and Drive Image 4.0
(partition/drive backup/recovery) as well as a CD with drivers
and documentation etc. The printed documentation is good too,
with a Quick Install Guide sheet and an excellent, very clear
and comprehensive (apart from glossing over many of the BIOS settings,
as is unfortunately typical) manual for the motherboard. There's
also a fairly hefty manual for all the included software.
click to enlarge
Performance:
The obvious comparison for
this board would be with a KT266A unit, so representing that chipset
we have Gigabyte's GA-7VTXE. I originally wanted to include an
AMD760 board but had some problems getting consistent results
from it, so that will have to wait for comparison in a later KT333
review. I tested the Soltek KT333 board with the memory at 266MHz
and again with the memory at 333MHz. This should let us see whether
theres any dramatic speed increase in KT333 itself, or by utilising
the DDR333 support of the newer chipset.
Testbed Setup:
AMD AthlonXP 1600+ CPU
Corsair XMS3000C2 (from Realtime-Systems) DDR SDRAM @ 266MHz @ CAS2
-or- @ 333MHz @ CAS2
IBM 75GXP 30GB HDD
X-Micro Impact T4600 (reviewed here) GF4 Ti4600 video card
Enermax 550W PSU
Win2K SP1
DirectX 8.1
VIA 4-in-1 438(2)v(a)
DetonatorXP 28.32
Sandra
Version 2002.1.8.59 of this popular benchmark from SiSoftware was used to test the CPU, chipset
and memory subsystems. Default settings were used for all tests.
3DMark2001SE
This product from MadOnion.com
has become the default DirectX benchmark and gives an indication
of gaming performance in that 3D API. Default settings were used
for all benchmarks.
Quake3: Arena
This game from id
Software isn't the latest and greatest, but still serves as
an excellent OpenGL benchmark and again gives an indication of
gaming performance. Defaults were used for the "Fastest"
and "High Quality" settings, but for "High Quality
1600x1200" as well as bumping up the resolution from the
default 800x600 in the HQ test, we also changed Geometric Detail
to Highest and dragged the Texture Detail slider to the maximum
setting. Our in-house Slayer
demo was used with Quake 1.31.
PCMark2002
This is the newest benchmark from MadOnion and this is the first
time I've used it in a review. It claims to be a more real-world,
system-wide benchmark. Benchmark fetishists will notice I have
not included the third betric, the "Disk Score", in
this graph. This is because it returned very strange results which
are clearly wrong - a score of over 5000 for the KT333 board and
only 300 or so for the KT266A board. Some more investigation into
what that's actually reporting is required it seems, because the
first-glance impression that one is over 10x as fast as the other
is clearly wrong when performing real-world tasks like copying
files around. Nonetheless, here are the other two metrics:
Overall, we can see there's no
great difference between KT266A and KT333 when both systems are
running DDR266 memory. Any difference between the scores there
can be whisked away under the rugs of experimental error, BIOS
revisions or other minor differences between the boards. When
the KT333 board's memory is run at DDR333 speeds there's definitely
an increase in speed - not a huge one, but a demonstrable, repeatable
one.
NEXT PAGE: Overclocking and Conclusions..
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