After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.

Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com

Soltek SL-75FRV Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Board Layout Items

Anti-Burn Shield II was first featured with the SL-75DRV5 and later approved by AMD as a viable way of protecting your CPU from damage due to overheating. The Anti-Burn Shield II system is designed to shut your system down when the internal thermal diode (only in XP processors) reaches a certain temperature. The system will then restart when the temperature drops down to a safe level.

One improvement over the SL-75DRV5 is that you can now almost fully adjust when the Anti-Burn Shield II system kicks in. This includes altering the cutoff temperature and even disabling it completely.

Here is something you don't see very often, a KTx chipset without active Northbridge cooling. At least the heatsink is larger than most and easily removable.

Something to make note of, not all SL-75FRV motherboards will have a jumper to select the 333MHz FSB. Early versions of this board only feature 100/133 selections despite the silkscreen and users manual saying that 166 is jumper selectable. I suspect this will change once the DDR333 XP processors are released.

The last item of interest is the strange location of the CMOS reset jumper in relation to the location of the CMOS battery. Most manuals will tell you to look near the battery for the reset jumper. In the case of the SL-75FRV you won't find it there. Maybe near is a relative term.

On to the benchmarks