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Soltek SL-K8AV-R 'Black Thunder' Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Board Features and Layout
The processor side of the board is always the most interesting and the SL-K8AV is no exception. There is a lot going on in this first photo though the most important is the bank of jumpers right above the AGP slot. These select the FSB level in increments of 200Mhz(default), 233Mhz, 266Mhz, and 270Mhz. When overclocking the bios will only allow adjustments up to these levels and if you wish to go higher the jumper will need to be set.
A round ball of thermal paste was used under the passive heatsink. As usual before reassembly this paste was cleaned up and replaced with Artic Silver III.
Like I mentioned before the VIA K8T800 chipset is split into the traditional Northbridge and Southbridge and follow the traditional roles.
If you hunt around you can find a variety of K8T800 enabled motherboards with different memory slot configurations. It would seem that officially this chipset only supports 2 DDR400 memory slots with a maximum of 4Gb addressable. Soltek has kept with the supported configuration on the Sl-K8AV for better performance.
A compact 3-phase power supply is used with 12v power being piped directly between the powersupply and chipset under the processor. (not easily seen in the photo) This is a rather nice location for the smaller of the two power plugs as it does not restrict airflow.
