Overclockers Australia - Soltek SL-75DRV5 KT333 Motherboard

Soltek SL-75DRV5 KT333 Motherboard - Page 3
31-May-2002 - Review by James "Agg" Rolfe

Overclocking and Tweaking:
There's a lot of stuff available in the BIOS, but some features are still stuck on switchblocks or jumpers on the motherboard itself. It would be nice if Soltek could move all that stuff into the BIOS for us. However, there's certainly no lack of tweaking options available. DDR voltage can be boosted to 2.7v and AGP voltage to 1.7v, both by jumper. Core voltage can be adjusted in .25 adjustments to 1.85v in BIOS. Switchblocks let you choose the base frequency (100, 133, 130, 150 or 166MHz) which you can then go up from in 1MHz increments in the BIOS. This switchblock is right at the end of the AGP slot and annoying to get to if you have a Ti4600 or Ti4400. CPU multiplier can ONLY be set by a second switchblock near the socket. Note that early BIOSes (including the shipping BIOS on this board) ignored the multiplier dipswitches, but the latest ones (from Soltek's site here) work fine. In-BIOS multiplier adjustment would have been nice. In the BIOS however there are the usual tweaking options with nothing obviously missing, and a few extra "Skew" ones, which aren't explained in the manual and didn't seem to do much.

One odd thing is that the low multiplier settings (5.5x, 6x, 6.5x) seemed to not work on either of my unlocked Duron 700's or my unlocked TBird 950. This is annoying, with 7x being the lowest available multiplier I was limited by core speed so couldn't stress the FSB fully. The Tbird is good to about 1050 on most boards at 1.85v, but so with a minimum 7x multiplier I could only get 155MHz from the board before my CPU started flaking out. I will say though, that the board was very stable at 155MHz. I could run 3DMark and Folding@Home, warmboot etc with no problems. It would have been nice to test the 166MHz capability of the board (with the PCI dropping back to 33MHz thanks to KT333's 1/5 PCI/FSB divisor), but with 7x multiplier that would require a core capable of 1162MHz - I don't have an unlocked CPU that can hit that. I did get the Tbird to POST at 166MHz, but it froze booting Win2K and refused to reboot, so that doesn't prove much. The two 1600+'s I have here are not unlocked and would be shooting for 1743MHz which, again, they're not capable of.

RedStorm Overclocking:
This is an interesting in-BIOS feature unique to Soltek. Basically, it's "automatic overclocking" for your CPU FSB. After you select this option from the bios, the system counts up in 1MHz increments, performing some test and when it decides it's hit the limit of stability, it stops. It's supposed to reboot at that point but it seemed to freeze (it warns that this may happen) so I powered it off and it would reboot with the FSB a few MHz below the last-tested speed. At first I was really skeptical about this because there's a limit to how much it can really test. For example, it's not going to tell you if your video card will get texture corruption from a too-high AGP bus, or if your HDD controller is going to get confused by a high PCI speed and write garbage all over your bootsector. But, it did manage to pick 1043MHz core speed for my test Tbird950, which has only ever seen 1050MHz when manually overclocking on other boards, so for the FSB-specific side of things it's not too bad. However, I was able to manually set it to 155MHz (WCPUID reports 1094MHz) and complete 3DMark2001SE's default benchmark ok, which again bodes well for overclocking on this motherboard. Whether RedStorm tests for errors that I can't see in manual overclocking or it's just being a little cautious, either way it seems a good tool for picking a baseline for overclocking.

Stability:
I've actually had this board banging around here for a couple of months now and have used it for testing over 25 video cards, including an 18-card roundup I wrote for PC PowerPlay Magazine, a later 6-card Radeon roundup and the two Ti4600 reviews we've seen on OCAU. It's also been used for testing RAM and copying data off a few HDD's I replaced in the testbeds. Of course, its idle hours have been spent crunching Folding@Home work units. All this adds up to a lot more stability testing than I am normally able to inflict on a component for review. However I'm happy to say the Soltek hasn't missed a beat. In Win2K or Win98SE, not a single spontaneous reboot or lockup/bluescreen I couldn't blame on overzealous video card overclocking. I've been working on other things and it's been sitting in the testbed with a 1600+ in it, folding for the team like a champ, for weeks. No complaints at all in that regard.

Conclusions:
Once again, Soltek provide a pleasant surprise. This board does lack the extra features of, say, Asus's A7V333 - no RAID controller, no USB2.0, no FireWire - nothing onboard apart from the sound, in fact. However it's very stable, certainly no slouch speedwise and it seems, as far as I can test, to be a pretty good overclocker with the latest BIOS. There are some layout gripes but no killer ones - I used a GF4 Ti4600 for plenty of testing on this board, and the tall components do get in the way a bit, but you can work around it. Things like the Anti-Burn Shield and their RedStorm Overclocking feature are definitely handy inclusions. Where the Soltek really streaks ahead is pricewise, though - Altech list the A7V333 at $264 RRP ($330 with RAID), while the Soltek is a mere $185! If you're already running a DDR SocketA system such as KT266A, there's not a lot of reason to make the move to KT333 just yet. But if you're thinking about going to DDR SocketA without wanting to blow a heap of cash on a lot of features you don't need, the Soltek SL-75DRV5 looks like an unmissable opportunity. Recommended!

Many thanks to Altech Computers, a distributor with offices in Brisbane and Sydney, for providing the review unit.

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