reviews

Soltek SL-85DR-C Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

The SL-85DR-C contains a wide variety of overclocking options including a set of FSB dipswitches located below the last PCI slot. The available settings include 100/103/105/111/130/133. AGP and DIMM voltage is also available on the motherboard though I didn't need to use them during my overclocking adventure. It should be noted that the location of these dipswitches is towards the bottom of the motherboard under the last PCI slot in what I would call the most confined location of the motherboard. On the plus side unless you like flipping dipswitches you can actually set the FSB from 100 to 255 in 1MHz increments via the RedStorm overclocking technology in the bios. So, really the dipswitches are not needed for any sort of overclocking. While on the subject of overclocking another important bios setting that should be mentioned is a selectable range of Vcore voltages from 1.10 to 1.85, of course these aid in overclocking stability.

One of the main reasons this chipset is so popular is the inclusion of DDR memory support. Officially the chipset will accept PC133, DDR200 and DDR266 with DDR only being supported on this board. Of course other speeds of DDR memory will work, for instance during testing we used DDR333 from Corsair and discovered no adverse issues. The i845D Northbridge only supports one channel of DDR memory and is why you only see 2 DDR memory slots. Some manufactures have included 3 memory slots though also require that special memory be used. Soltek kept with the recommended design, which gives excellent performance and compatibility at the expense of an easy memory upgrade path, then again with memory as cheap as it is that will hardly be a deciding factor.

The SL-85DR-C supports a single 478 Pentium 4 processor and Soltek was even nice enough to silkscreen the word "Northwood478" next to the socket. Might they be trying to tell us something?
I also noticed something in the bios that struck me as somewhat strange. MPS Revision 1.1 is grayed out, hummmm