Soltek SL-75MRN-L Motherboard Review

I snuck in a few teaser pics into the review this time and for those of you that clicked on the images you may have noticed the rather high RPM for Fan1. Well here is the reason, I decided to change it up a bit and replaced the stock Northbridge cooler with this 10,000 Rpm 40mm case fan, the fan is made by Top Motor for use in 1U rack mounted server cases. I had a couple of them laying around the lab so to aid in Northbridge cooling I screwed one down. The IR thermometer recorded a 5 degree C drop in temperature, which aided in overclocking stability.

I would like to mention that overclocking on this board wasn't as easy as it was on the SL-75FRN-L. I noticed some strange things that at first caused a few headaches but eventually got sorted out.

First of all any large jump in processor overclocking speed would lock this board up, that is to say if you wanted to get to 166Mhz FSB you would need to do so in rather small steps. For instance going from 13.5x133 to 12x166 would require stepping down to 12x and rebooting to Windows. Then go back into the bios and move the FSB from 133 to 150. Reboot to Windows, move to 160Mhz, reboot to Windows, and move to 166Mhz. Overclocking in this manner didn't require any boost in voltage but did require quite a few reboots to make it happen. Moving past 166FSB seemed to require the same approach.

On the positive side unlike the SL-75FRN this board didn't require that the processor be unlocked via the "wire trick". All multiplier settings are available and selectable via the BIOS. Knowing that overclocking was being very difficult I tried the wire trick as a test. The default multiplier was set to 5.5 and moving directly to 13.5x133 posed no significant problem although moving beyond that setting required the stepped approach as illustrated before.

Having heard of similar accounts of processor incompatibility with various Soltek nForce2 motherboards I can only conclude that this is a BIOS level problem so your results could be different. As of this writing there is a Athlon XP 2400+ in route to test this theory so be sure to check the Ninjalane Message Forums for any updates.

With the 10,000 RPM fan installed lets see what this board can do.