Soltek SL-85ERV Motherboard Review

In June of 2002 Soltek was proud to announce that they would be the first motherboard manufacturer to release a board based on the new VIA P4X400 chipset. As we know being the first to market is both good and bad. The good is being able to say hey I'm the first. The bad is that many finite details get overlooked that usually affects the end user. For instance a rather large oversight is the 40+ pages dedicated to setting up an Award BIOS when the SL-85ERV uses and AMI BIOS. I have been told by people at Soltek that the manual and other packaging documentation will be revised before the SL-85ERV-L product release later this year.

All things aside the Soltek SL-85ERV is a very solid board featuring a great layout and design, a snazzy silver PCB color, complete control over motherboard speeds and controls, and really the VIA P4X400 chipset is just icing on the cake. I would have liked to have seen better performance from this board considering the components I used but typically VIA's first chipset release never really performs as you would expect.

Overclocking the SL-85ERV proved to be quite fruitful considering a default voltage overclock of 2.66Ghz from 2.26Ghz which I'm certain would have gone higher had I not been memory limited.

AGP 8x
Overclockable DDR333 memory controller
Unofficial DDR400 support
RedStorm tech via a BIOS patch
Heatsink Mount with backing plate
Metallic Silver PCB
Full Version Software
No Modem Riser slot!
A wide variety of overclocking controls

No Northbridge cooler
Some listed features need additional cables (not included)
Inaccurate users manual
AGP Pro for usage of higher end video cards