Soltek SL-86SPE-L (Springdale) Motherboard Review

Over the past couple of years Soltek has been one of the leaders in creative PCB marketing that usually follows the major chipset releases. The scheme started off with the "Red Lighting" Pentium 4 series (Intel) featuring a sexy red PCB. The "Purple Ray" AMD series boards came next and had a purple PCB. When Soltek introduced their line of video cards the Pentium 4 side of things got a metallic silver PCB that they called "Glacier Silver". The "Golden Flame" came next and to distance the nVidia nForce2 from the competetion it featured a metallic gold PCB. This of course brings us to the present, not to go against tradition a new marketing message has surfaced called "Violet Eyes" and as you might have guessed features a violet metallic PCB.

Before we get started here is a little recap on the i865PE (Springdale) chipset (from the IS7 review)

800/533/400 MHz System Bus
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology Support
478-pin Processor Package Compatibility
Intel Hub Architecture
Dual-Channel DDR 400/333/266 SDRAM
AGP8X Interface
Integrated Hi-Speed USB 2.0
Dual Independent Serial ATA Controllers
Intel RAID Technology
Ultra ATA/100
AC'97 Audio

The two major highlights of this chipset include a 800Mhz FSB and Dual Channel DDR 400 memory. The Soltek SL-86SPE-L doesn't use the ICH5R Southbridge so the Intel RAID technology is non existant on this Springdale motherboard.

I mentioned before that this board had a violet colored PCB well as you can see the whole board is violet and contains really no color accents. You will also notice the absence of the reinforcement plate on the back of the motherboard. I may not have put much emphasis on this in the past but this feature is one of those things that I looked forward to having. With the reinforcement plate installed there is little fear that you will break or overly bend the board when installing a high performance heatsink.