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Soltek SL-75FRN-L Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Shortly after Comdex Soltek announced a new series of motherboards using this new tekniq dubbed "Golden Flame". The marketing idea behind these boards was to make a limited edition gold PCB along with making many of the plastic connector pieces a bright yellow. We were able to see one of these new PCB's first hand at Comdex this past year and though we didn't know exactly what was going on it did strike us as being another first in the motherboard industry.

In the past we've seen quite a few color combinations come from Soltek starting with the Red Lighting on their Pentium 4 motherboards, followed by the Purple Ray on the AMD side. Red Lighting later became Glacier Silver when Soltek started making video cards. With three(+) new and exciting chipsets on the horizon It would appear that the "Golden Flame" is next in line. It should be noted that current rumors are flying around saying that the Golden Flame might not make it through a product cycle depending on sales, so this board could truly be "Limited Edition"

nVidia nForce2 SPP Northbridge
nVidia nForce MCP Southbridge
Socket 462 AMD processor support
AGP 8x
Dual Channel DDR 333/266 with enhanced DDR400 support
ATA133
10/100 Ethernet
USB 1.1 and 2.0
6-channel audio
5 PCI slots
3 DDR memory slots
Optional Serial ATA Raid

As you can see the board is a metallic gold not far removed from the Glacier Silver process that we have seen on the SL-85ERV. Many of the slots are made from yellow plastic with the exception of the center DIMM slot that is normally not used in Dual Channel DDR mode.