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

Overclocking the Sl-86SPE-L was pretty straightforward. Since Pentium 4's are multiplier locked the only option you have is to increase the FSB. The only tricky part is how do you know what your memory is running at?? Well in the case of the 86SPE by choosing the SPD setting the bios will auto configure your memory to whatever it is programmed to run at. Alternatively by choosing any of the pre-determined memory clock speeds your memory will run at that speed plus whatever you add to the FSB. For instance running at 217Mhz FSB with the memory clock at 400Mhz will render a final memory clock of 434Mhz (or the max our XMS3500 was rated at), by setting the memory clock to 333Mhz the FSB can be raised considerably higher without the fear of running your memory modules out of frequency. This is a different approach from what Abit has chosen to do with their system clock dividers but basically works in much the same way.

The highest stable overclock was 230Mhz, the system got really buggy around 240Mhz with random lockups and video crashes. Soltek claims that this board will run 1200Mhz FSB with a 2.4C Pentium 4 processor, having seen how this board handles a 3.0Ghz processor I'd be rather skeptical in that actually happening with retail CPU's, though to be honest the jury is still out on the issue.

Memory scores are not as high was I would have expected due partially to the memory clock being set at 333Mhz. ((333 * 231)/200) = 384Mhz which is slightly better than the IS7 at the same FSB speed.

The Quake3 timedemo score jumped to a respectable level.