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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: Top Page At One Glance Features VRM Layout BIOS, Test Setup Memory Performance Business Winstones Content Creation Gaming Performance Overclocking, HW Monitor, Conclusions Your comments? Soltek Mainboards Online
Soltek SL-75FRN L    "Golden Flame"
(Review by MS, February, 17 2003)

Not the biggest player in the US market, Soltek have had a few 15 minutes of fame in the past with budget oriented performance boards for the enthusiast. If this sounds like a paradox, the nForce2-based "Golden Flame" series is living proof that the concept is viable and can even be dressed up in attractive colors reminiscent of a potato-beetle (or so). A golden PCB without the actual weight of the heavy metal, canary-yellow DIMM and PCI slots as rallye stripes and a few surface components to accent the color scheme appear more a fashion statement than a committment to serious technology.

Well, quite the opposite is true, it is not just eye candy that we get here but one of the fastest boards we have ever seen. In light of that, some beauty marks like the missing soundstorm become negligible. If it is fast, does it still overclock and what other tradeoffs are there or is it really all gold that flames?

Soltek is not a completely unknown entity in the mainboard world but neither are they amongst the really big players, or so it would appear. Keep in mind, though that Soltek is another subsidiary of the same multitiered conglomerate that also makes ECS boards, manufactures ABit and Shuttle boards and a variety of others. Our past experiences with Soltek have been on and off, distributors in the US coming and faltering and trading hands which does not make it easy to maintain any regular relationship with them.

A golden PCB and red hot performance have caused the "Golden Flame" name.

Some of Soltek's approaches to conquering the market appear somewhat strange, little hand bags in flying colors for the mainboard as promotional items are cute but don't necessarily win over critical and brand-conscious customers. In terms of overall impressions, Soltek boards have never been the Cadillacs in the mainboard scenery. They were fast, sometimes a bit capricious or rather, quite sensitive to timing settings because of very aggressive BIOS tunings, which also had a tendency to limit the overall overclocking capabilities of the boards.

As of lately, Soltek has also made some news for adapting Shuttle's XPC SFF concept and making some hybrid designs between the SFF and a miniature tower called QBic. We have yet to see those in person but they look interesting enough and will come. As we mentioned above, Soltek boards have always been among the fastest in their class and, therefore, it comes as no surprise that the AMD platform has been complemented by a board featuring the nVidia nForce2 chipset. The board, christened as "Golden Flame" comes in four different flavors, that is, with either nVidia's System Platform Processor (SPP) or the Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP) and featuring the Promise SATA150 RAID controller or not. None of the offerings features the MCP2, all boards are built around the less expensive nForce2 MCP lacking the audio processing unit and the built-in 3Com network controller.

The SoltekUSA website makes it somewhat difficult to figure out what is what since the product pictures all show the same slightly distorted photograph of the basic version, likewise, the close-ups all show the same board, that is, the version without RAID. A bit more attention to detail would probably not hurt the sales here. In any event, the name Golden Flame indicates the first mainboard with a golden PCB. We ran a quick chemical analysis and were not able to find any traces of gold in the board so we assume Soltek refers to the color only. The innocent victim of our testing procedures was the basic version of the basic version, that is, no integrated graphics and no on-board SATA RAID, just like the one that is shown on the product pages at SoltekUSA: model number SL-75FRN-L where the L stands for the integrated LAN, courtesy of the Realtek RTL8139C(L) onboard fast Ethernet controller.

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