Overclockers Australia - Soltek SL-85DRS2

Soltek SL-85DRS2 - SiS645A2 P4 Motherboard
12-April-2002 - Review by: Asher "Acid" Moses
Review unit provided by: Altech Computers.

Introduction
Soltek have been in the motherboard manufacturing business for quite some time now and have developed a strong reputation in places such as USA, Taiwan and Europe. This is mainly due to the fact that they have continued to produce high performing, stable products that most users can afford. Soltek are not as well known in Australia, due to the fact that there is only one Soltek motherboard distributor in the whole country. This distributor also happens to be one of OCAU's major sponsors, namely Altech.

We have been lucky enough to obtain one of the latest additions to Soltek's Pentium 4 motherboard range, the 85DRS2. This board is based on the A2 revision of the SiS645 chipset, which is supposed to provide a significant performance increase over the original SiS645. How does it stack up against the competition? Read on to find out!

Packaging and Software Bundle
As you can see from the image below, Soltek's graphic artists certainly did a fine job in designing the 85DRS2's packaging. It features a shiny, metallic finish that is sure to stand out from the competition on store shelves.

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Inside the box were some IDE and floppy cables, a driver CD, a detailed User's Manual and a removable thermal sensor. On top of this, there is a second CD bundled with the board that includes PC-cillin 2000, Virtual Drive, PartitionMagic 6.0 SE and Drive Image 4.0. PC-cillin is an anti-virus program made by a company called Trend, Virtual Drive is a program that emulates a CD drive, allowing you to run CD-ROM applications without physically loading a CD, PartitionMagic allows you to partition your hard disk or reclaim wasted disk space while Drive Image allows you to backup, recover or upgrade your hard disk data quickly, easily and safely. Included with the software is a second manual that teaches you how to use and install each of the above programs.

This software bundle certainly ranks up there with the best i've ever seen. Let's see if I can say the same about the rest of the board.

Layout / Features

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One of the first things I noticed when taking the board out of the box was its bright red PCB. Although this won't mean much to many of you, those of you that have modified your case with a window kit will find this as an added bonus that you can show off to your mates at the next LAN party.

The 85DRS2 features a slot layout of 6 PCI, 1 AGP and 3 DIMM. This is an ideal layout for enthusiasts because it removes any ISA/CNR/AMR slots that are no longer used by many people and leaves space for more important components. The 6 PCI slots are very handy for those of you that like to use many PCI devices or have a cooler on your AGP card that renders the first PCI slot useless. The three DIMM slots support a total of 3GB DDR266 memory or 2GB DDR333 memory. This should be more than enough for anyone thinking about purchasing a board for general use.

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One very interesting thing I noticed about the 85DRS2 was the fact that it allows you to use a PSU (power supply) that is not Pentium 4 compliant. Most Pentium 4 motherboards require a new power supply that features an ATX 12V 4-pin connector. However, on the 85DRS2 there is a standard MOLEX connector as well as an ATX 12V connector so those of you with an older PSU can run the board without an ATX 12V connector at all. This makes upgrading to a Pentium 4 system much cheaper and easier.

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Next to the power connectors are a set of DIP switches. I will be talking about these in more detail a little later on in the review, however, the only way you will be able to set the FSB to anything other than 100MHz or 133MHz is through these DIP switches. Using different switch-combinations shown in the user's manual, you can select from either 100, 105, 108, 112 or 133MHz.

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The board also features a 3-phase power solution, as indicated by the MOSFETs in the below picture. These MOSFETs are CPU voltage regulators that convert the 5V into 1.7V (or whatever your core voltage is, depending on CPU). In this setup the current is distributed across 3 phases instead of 2, and thus the regulators run cooler. This can contribute to higher stability.

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The board supports six USB ports, with two available on the backpanel and the rest enabled through an optional add-in bracket. It also features onboard AC97 audio, which, like most onboard sound solutions, is not very attractive to those looking for high quality sound and is only useful as a temporary solution. One of the only features I felt was lacking from this board was ATA133 support. With many newer drives being based around the ATA133 standard, this could be a problem for those of you that want a future-proof system. The lack of USB 2.0 support should also be noted, but it is not a necessary feature since there have not been many USB 2.0 devices released yet.

Cooling the SiS645 northbridge is a silver, passive heatsink. No active cooling was required and I found that it ran pretty cool throughout the whole testing period. The lack of active cooling also helps to reduce noise output for those of you that require a silent system.

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