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After it became a bit quiet around the VIA P4X266 chipset and the new "A" revision, Soltek is lashing out at the P4 community with a fire-engine not only by reference to the PCB color but also by its performance. A well-balanced software bundle including such goodies as PartitionMagic, very good documentation not only on part of the mainboard but also regarding the utilities are the initial strongholds of the board. There are a few inconsistencies in the layout but nothing can overshadow the fact that paired with an overclocked Northwood, this is the fastest board we have ever laid our hands on.

Not quite the most renowned manufacturer, Soltek, based in Taiwan have been around for quite a few years. Over the past 2-3 years, they have hamstered award after award, mostly on European websites, however, their presence in the US market has been rather thin. After the long-gone SL-56D1 (SuperSocket7) and the SL-75DRV2, both supporting AMD CPUs, we finally have one of their P4 platform offerings on the grill.

So far, our experience with Soltek has been that their products were solid, with some room for improvement (remember their slocket with the rattling noises?) but they always had something about them that made them stand out with a simple solution like the sticker with all settings on the back of the slocket. How does a company like Soltek stand up against the established competition of leading brands? For once, their products are historically less expensive than what the competition has to offer. There is, however, a fine line between less expensive and cheap, the latter being meant as something only bargain hunters would go for. In other words, the red pen needs to be applied very carefully and possibly without getting into a terrain where quality is being jeopardized.

An alliance with the big guys also helps, particularly if it becomes a mutually beneficial liaision, in that the mainboard manufacturer promotes a chipset which offers superior performance but is politically incorrect. A case in point is the new VIA P4X266A chipset, a revamped version of the P4X266 that stole the show from Intel's i850 dual Rambus chipset at last year's Computex, although under tightly controlled conditions.

Briefly, the enhancements over the older version include deeper pipelines, also known as DRAM queue which enable bursts of 8 instead of bursts of 4 quad words as well as a re-spun South Bridge to enable UATA 133 (133 MB burst or cached transfers on the IDE interface). For those who are not familiar with the bursting scheme, the standard SDRAM controllers allowed bursts of 4 x 64 bit. That means that after accessing a memory page, each read command will result in four consecutive data outputs, which, in single data rate mode would take up four bus cycles.

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