After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.

Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com

Soltek SL-85ERV Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Tuesday, August 06, 2002

Motherboard Features Cont.

Motherboard Features

The general layout of the 85ERV is better than most and really follows a typical Soltek design. Power connectors are located together near the processor; Drive connectors are in the lower right. Memory slots are hindered slightly when using a longer AGP video card.

The board features a very small number of jumpers, which in many cases will never need to be touched. All overclocking/tweaking controls are located in the BIOS and allow adjustments to memory speed, frequency, timing and voltage, processor frequency and voltage, and AGP speed and voltage. Really it's a complete toolbox of settings.

I would suggest to anyone that gets a SL-85ERV to update to the latest bios revision (as of this writing AJ1.1) this bios fixes a linear clock bug and adds the ever popular RedStorm overclocking feature. Before and after tests of this BIOS have shown that the system will post (and most likely boot) with the memory clock set to 400MHz.

The 85ERV has 4 3-pin fan headers two of which are RPM monitored and all but one is easy to get to. You can see the elusive fan header in the lower left section of this photo. The location is logical but being right next to the ATX connector and between two capacitors makes it difficult for people with fat fingers, like me, to get to.

There is of course no fan/heatsink combo on the Northbridge. Instead Soltek provided a rather nice surface treated ALU heatsink and even though the heatsink is quite decorative it does get quite warm. I measured surface temperatures to be over 100 degrees F! (38 degrees C) during testing. At least it's not glued down and can easily be replaced.