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Soltek SL-75FRN-L Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Monday, February 03, 2003

Motherboard Layout and Features

Motherboard Layout and Feature

Here is something you don't see on every Soltek motherboard, Active cooling on the Northbridge. You will also be relieved to know that the entire area has been covered in thermal paste. A little on the heavy side but it's there none the less. This will be replaced with Arctic Silver 2 before testing is started.

While the heatsink was off we noticed that this particular Northbridge chip wasn't made in Taiwan like many of the others that we've seen but is rather of Korean origin. Chances are the two plants do similar work so it shouldn't make much difference.

Something we haven't seen on any AMD enabled motherboard thus far is the usage of the +12v power connector usually reserved for Pentium 4 systems, Soltek didn't provide a molex connector like they do on the Pentium 4 boards so you will be required to use a compliant power supply when running this motherboard.

Looking further into the onboard power supply we see that Soltek is using a slightly different type of system that only requires two phases. Normally this could be cause for alarm but with a direct connection to the +12V power connector and double the normal capacitor count I don't suspect there will be any problems with power.

Here we see that Soltek has included an under chip thermal resistor for complete hardware monitoring for non-XP processors. This resister is disabled when the bios detects an on-chip thermal solution found in the newer XP processors.

It should also be noted that the SL-75FRN only has two thermal resistors unlike the three sensors on past Soltek boards.

Like all previous Soltek motherboards this board comes with an impressive set of "full-version" software like Partition Magic and Drive Image Pro (most are not usable with WindowsXP) along with the other needed items such as a users guide, software manual (for the included software), ATA133 and floppy cables. The items you won't see include the 6-channel audio adapter, and additional USB cables. Check out the nifty case badge (shown in the lower left).