Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

For the past two years, Soltek have been absent from the US markets. Nonetheless, their boards have consistently been ranked among the top of their class elsewhere. We managed to get our hands on the latest KT266A chipset based mainboard, the SL 75DRV2 and ran it through the mill. At the default settings that are tweaked towards top performance the SL 75DRV2 has some shortcomings in overall overclockability, however, resetting the CMD Rate in the BIOS to 2T allows higher FSB settings. Except for CAS latency and CMD rate, no memory timing settings are present in the BIOS. The RedStorm overclocking utility appears somewhat useless. Overall, an extremely stable board with high performance and good features like e.g. smart card interface, the SL 75DRV2 is a serious contender in the field of KT266A-based boards.

Soltek is certainly not one of the standard household brands when it come to mainboards, particularly not in the US. Over the past few years, we have seen them come and go, a great relationship with their original distributors finally came to an end when the US distribution was given up altogether some 2 years ago. The last encounter we had with Soltek was their Slocket which certainly made some waves and posed a stiff competition to similar products sold by Iwill, MSI and ABit. After that, it became rather quiet around here with respect to Soltek.

Update: Despite the fact that we were told by Soltek Taiwan that there was currently no US distribution in place, we were contacted by the current Soltek US distributor who has been established since Jan 2000 in the US.

In contrast to the US market, Soltek does play a much more prominent role in the European and Asian markets. The reputation of Soltek mainboards was spread mostly through the efforts of British-based websites but alas, there is still no US distribution channel set-up. In addition, it appears not that easy to even get access to review boards, which seem to be rather scarce. This of course is in contrast to the continuous stream of Soltek press releases and News letters highlighting the qualities and awards of the various Soltek products. Needless to say that based on party-line statements it is not possible to make any recomendation as long as there is no real hardware to back up the claims.

In any case, we finally managed to get our hands onto a sample fresh from Taiwan, and set out to check whether the Soltek SL-75DRV2 indeed deserves the laurels it has received elsewhere.

next page:    => At One Glance =>