Soltek SL-75DRV5 KT333 Motherboard Review

Once again Soltek has produced a very good product despite the limitations of the chipset and processor the system board ran flawless. During the setup I did have some issues with memory settings while running at 166MHz. I found that CAS settings really had no effect on performance but when adjusting the "System Performance" setting to anything other than "Normal" the computer would fail to reboot. I had similar problems when the memory speed was at 133MHz but only when "System Performance" was set to "Fastest".

I cannot say to much about the performance gains attained by the KT333 chipset due to the bottleneck in the Athlon system bus but much like the SL-75DRV4 we still have quite a lot of control over what happens on the motherboard. For instance AGP and DDR voltages can be set manually. Bios level settings for processor voltage and front side bus. Multipliers can be set manually if the processor is unlocked. (This is pretty easy to do on T-birds though becomes more difficult with the XP's). DDR memory settings are also quite numerous but nothing out of the ordinary, DRAM clock, Timing, CAS length, Bank Interleave, and Command Rate.

Anti-Burn Shield II is the big enhancement that Soltek added to the SL-75DRV5 but currently only works with XP processors. By default Soltek ships the board with this feature disabled but a quick flip of a jumper can change that. As with previous DRV motherboards you still have the option of having the BIOS warn you when the processor reaches a certain temperature and even shut down if need be, though keep in mind these temperatures are measured inside the processor socket and can often be inaccurate.

I had some really good luck overclocking my XP 1700+ on the SL-75DRV5 and actually posted higher numbers than on the SL-75DRV4 without any need to make Vcore adjustments. I'm thinking that with a board mounted heatsink and high output fan this board could easily post 2000+ and maybe 2100+ speeds using the same processor.

Now for my list of The Good Things and The Bad Things.

Purple PCB
ATA133
DDR333?
Variety of overclocking and tweaking controls
Less dipswitches = less confusion
Active cooling on Northbridge

CNR slot
No AGP Pro slot
Very little performance gain over the KT266A