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| Soltek SL-85MIR-L The Albino Rhino | ||
| (Review by Patrick "tide" Huber, edited by MS, August 14, 2002) |
Summary
The Intel i845G chipset featuring a real AGP interface instead of relying exclusively on integrated graphics has made a splash as the one size fits all wonder amongst contemporary chipsets. With official support only for PC2100 but the back orifice into the realm of DDR333, the i845G is an unlimited playground for the mainboard manufacturers to build ATX boards, and micro-ATX boards and ATX 2.03 boards (required anyway by Intel). While most other manufacturers are shooting for the most colorful presentation of their boards, Soltek goes with the pure albino look of white on white. Silver components such as capacitors blend in perfectly with the surrounding PCB and any rework borders on the impossible. But then, who needs reworks, we did not and we don't expect anyone else.
The Intel i845G chipset also features a number of buzz words like "Intel Extreme Graphics" and "Dynamic Video Memory Management", not to mention "Zone Rendering". What is really behind these terms and do they go beyond semantics? Compare our findings with the claims made by Intel ....
Soltek, one of the silent acquisitions of EliteGroup/ECS are apparently determined to become the equivalent of Cadillac within the multi-brand conglomerate which involves some serious in-house competition with brands like Abit, just to mention one. There is hardly any day where we are not getting at least one of their newsletters hilighting the latest awards from more or lesser known websites. On the other hand, there are not really many reasons for Soltek to hold back, their products have shed the childhood diseases and show good, if not outstanding performance at a budget price level. This is said with the caveat that some other features like overclockability have often fallen victim to too aggressive tweaking of chipset timing parameters. The SL-75DRV2 , just to give one example was blazing fast but, as long as the CMD rate was left at 1T was almost hopelessly behind the competition with respect to overclocking capabilities. Likewise, the SL-85DRV3, to name an example for the P4 platform has been the very fastest board at its time we got to work with.
Overall, the underrepresentation of Soltek in the American markets appears more a lack of marketing and advertising effort than a lack of quality of the product. In other words, we see ads for Soltek on European publications but even the US distributors run for cover whenever the topic promotion of product is mentioned only remotely. Rather, they send press releases and ... press releases and .... more press releases.
Back to the topic at hand, the Soltek SL-85MIR-L. Based on the Intel i845G chipset, delivering Micro ATX size in a white-clad PCB and all of this at a very reasonable price, the SL-85-MIR-L shows Soltek once again on top of things even though or, despite of the fact that the acronym MIR is usually associated with the Russian Space station sharing the fate of Atlantis. Likewise, the white color implemented with the last solder mask does not indicate a prototype, on the contrary, the solder mask makes reworks as good as imposible which, on the other hand, shows some confidence of Soltek in their product (at least that's what their press releases are telling us).
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