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  • Soltek SL-85DRS2 Motherboard Review
  • Soltek SL-85DRS2 Motherboard Review

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    Introduction

    Introduction
    One of things that we try to do here at Ninjalane is try to feature unique and high quality products and often times these products are not easily obtained here in the United States. Soltek motherboards fall into that category and honestly I never really paid much attention to the company until recently. What I'm finding is that some of their stuff is quite intriguing. Back in November and December of last year Soltek announced two versions of a motherboard based on the SiS645 chipset dubbed the SL-85DRS and SL-85DRS2. Both of these boards are built on the P4 platform and feature DDR333, the only major difference between the two is an enhanced Northbridge on the SL-85DRS2 for increased memory performance.
    SiS645 Chipset
    As you can see by the chart the chipset is made up of two chips dubbed the north and south bridges. The SiS645A2 Northbridge supports the following memory formats. DDR333, DDR266, PC133. (of course on this board PC133 isn't available). AGP 2x/4x, Pentium 4 processors with a Quad Pumped 400MHz FSB. (There is also unofficial support for the new 533MHz FSB processors that are due out later this year.)

    The SiS961 Southbridge is quite small and connects to the Northbridge via a bi-directional 16-bit data bus that is able to transfer at 533 MB/s. Typically SiS has integrated the north and Southbridge chips together though in the interest of cost efficiency and easy upgradability a 2-chip solution was used.

    Here are some of the outstanding features the SL-85DRS2 motherboard has to offer. For a complete list please refer to http://www1.soltek.com.tw/English/product/85drs2.htm.
    478 P4 Processor support including Northwood.
    3 2.5v DDR memory slots (6 banks)
    DDR333 unbuffered memory support up to 2GB (2 slots)
    DDR266 unbuffered memory support up to 3GB (3 slots)
    1 AGP 4x slot
    6 32-bit PCI slots
    4 USB
    Onboard audio
    UATA 100/66/33 with 4 Drive support

    According to the Soltek website this board is equipped with "RedStorm Overclocking" & "SmartDoc. Anti-Burn Shield" but the sample that I received doesn't seem to have this feature, actually there are no real bios overclocking features at all.