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- Date:
- Thursday , May 02, 2002
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Soltek SL-75DRV5 Mainboard Review
Soltek's latest KT333 chipset board is certainly a head turner because of the Mardi Gras colored PCB, but features like Anti-Burn Shield II are really what got us interested. All shields full, phasers on stun, make it so...
BIOS:
This board is supplied with a Phoenix/AwardBIOS that many of us are familiar with. As usual, we will not bore you will photos of every screen, but will rather hit the high points that the tweakers want to see.
The first item you will see when sliding into the BIOS to control the CPU settings is "Red Storm Overclocking". This of course is a very handy feature, if you are in fact going to be OCing your CPU. As you can see above, you simply have to select Red Storm OC and then select "YES". The rest of the work is handled by the system. What happens next is very simple. The board starts raising the FSB MHz by integers of "1" and doing a quick stability test. When it finally gets high enough that the board fails, it reboots and lowers the FSB value. Basically, it finds what it considers to be the highest stable bus speed for your setup. We did use Red Storm Overclocking and found it to do exactly what it said it would do. Gone are the days of moving one rung at a time up what can be a very tall MHz ladder. As mentioned before, the FSB is fully able to be controlled inside the BIOS as well, all the way up to 200MHz, 1MHz at a time.
The Vcore is adjustable up to 1.85v by simply selecting it in the BIOS.
There are a ton of other settings in the CPU BIOS, but none seem to be very useful as there is not an explanation of them in the Soltek manual. They are simply explained as "leave at default".
The chipset BIOS selections have all the latest and greatest features that we have come to know and love. One feature that you will find come in handy is that the current CPU bus speed is displayed as well as the current memory bus speed. Nice markers to let you know where you are when tweaking.
You can set the memory bus to match the CPU bus (designated by "133" in the BIOS or you can set it for +33Mhz designated by "166" in the BIOS. Dram's timing can be set by hand, or you can rely on the SPD on the stick to choose the settings for you.
CAS Latency, Bank Interleaving, and DRAM Command are all there and tweakable.
One very interesting feature of the Soltek SL75DRV5 is that it has a feature called "Smart Doc Anti-Burn Shield". As many of us know, the Palomino core has the internal diode needed to get a temperature reading directly from the CPU core itself. We have not seen anyone utilize this till now. Unlike other solutions that rely on the thermister in the bottom of the Socket A for temperature readings, this Soltek board takes the temperature from the AthlonXP core.
The beauty of the Smart Doc is the ability to shut down the CPU to avoid it being damaged from heat if the system is turned on in the BIOS. If your CPU gets too hot, the Smart Doc system with stop power to the CPU, in effect turning it off. However, this does not seem to be foolproof. Instead of properly shutting down, it turns the power off while the temperature is too high. When the CPU temp falls back below the specified temperature, it powers the CPU back on instead of having the user check the system for problems and then turning it back on by hand.
The system being managed this way turns the system on and off repeatedly as the temperature rises and falls. The big question is, "Will this save my CPU in the event that the CPU heatsink is removed?" The answer to the question is more or less "Yes", but we did find a situation that was less than favorable while testing.
The first Mpeg below shows us removing the heatsink from the CPU and what happened after removing the heatsink about five or six times. The system is shown running when we removed the heatsink. As you can see, the system starts to pulse the power on and off, then we replace the heatsink. The system does in fact reboot and start back up normally. Sadly though, it appears that our 1800+ AthlonXP had already sustained some damage in our testing, and halfway through reboot decided that it was going to fail. The CPU was in fact rendered useless. Yes, one burnt AthlonXP. However, this was done after repeatedly abusing the CPU. We cannot really fault Soltek 100% with this because under normal operations this situation would have most likely not have occured.
It is our opinion that the Smart Doc system does have the ability to save your chip if you manually power down the system once you are aware of the problem.
In this second Mpeg, we show you the "pulsing" with an infrared temperature gauge in place reading the CPU's core surface temperature. While we recorded these Mpegs with our modem readers in mind, you can clearly see the temperature rise and fall as the system powers off and on when it sees the temperature rise above the designated shutdown and then fall below the temperature mark. Notice the temperature "bounce" between 151°F and 163°F.
It is my opinion that the Smart Doc could easily be improved to be nearly faultless if the system fully powered down the mainboard at the first sign of a higher than allowed CPU core temp.
Soltek does include a hardware monitor software package. While this excited us in being able to use the on-die diode to read the core temp, we were disappointed to find out that the software did not use the on-die diode but rather a temperature sensor located in the bottom of the Socket A like we are used to seeing. This can be easily confirmed by using a canned air canister turned upside down and spraying the bottom of the Socket A with liquid Tetrafluoroethane that immediately freezes the bottom of the Socket A. You will immediately see the temperature drop in the Smartguardian software. If it did in fact use the on-die diode, you would not see an immediate response. We did verify this and Soltek confirmed our theories.