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Soltek SL-75MRN-L Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Monday, March 31, 2003

Motherboard Layout and Features

Motherboard Layout and Feature

Once again we have the much appreciated active cooling on the nForce2 Northbridge and the fan is adequate for just about all modes of operation. Looking under this cooler we can see that Soltek supplied just the right amount of thermal paste.

The springs holding the cooler in place are not very strong so, if you remove the Northbridge cooler you might want to apply a quick twist to the mounting tabs to help re-seat it.

Here is the nVidia nForce2 IGP Northbridge, nothing really unusual. The chip is the newer A3 revision from the Taiwan plant.

A thin film of Arctic Silver was used during the reassembly.

This board supports all Socket A processors including the new "Barton" core using the 333Mhz front side bus. For compatibility purposes a thermal probe is located in the middle of the CPU socket for processor thermal monitoring.

The power supply appears to be a 2-phase Mosfet system that draws power directly from the Pentium 4 +12v power connector. There are only a handful of motherboards using this approach to power delivery and I think it is one of the better solutions out there. Considering the direct +12V power connection and double the normal capacitor count I don't suspect there will be any problems with power.

The Soltek SL-75MRN uses nForce2 MCP Southbridge. This chip contains all of the standard features like ATA133, and USB 2.0 but lacks "Firewire" and NVIDIA nForce APU. The board still features 6-channel audio via an onboard Realtek sound processor.
The extra audio ports will need to be purchased separately.