Soltek SL75-DRV4

Though, I'm coming into this well over a year after the board was released, I have to comment. Beautiful board. Though Soltek's a very unknown company, I bought this board when it came out, retail. In included a nice software bundle including virtual drive, a drive partition program and a drive image program, as well as the generic PC Cillin all board typically come with. It comes with what you NEED. Active chipset cooling, and at the time came with support for everything up to date except USB 2.0. Ultimately it's every bang for your buck and I really couldn't tell you there was anything *wrong* with this mobo. It really holds it's weight.

This is the best board released ever! I have had no problems at all, and I'm a serious OC expert!

I have made my own Liquid Cooling sys, and as long as I can maintain a cold enough temperature on the core, there are absolutely NO unstability! Even when running winXP!!!

I was just about to buy the SL-75DRV5, but the reviews pointed out that, no board could match the DRV4..

I haven't reached 150MHz FSB, that's not possible on my sys!

But when I had my T-Bird AXIA 1200 it got it up running 1460MHz!!! but that's also because of the processor, a very good investement!! buy it, try it, LOVE IT!

//--\ - TomiXx 2002/2003 Merry X-Maz:-?

The SL75-DRV4 motherboard from Soltek is a relative newcomer and soltek have never been known as a major player against the likes of abit and asus, but now I think they have given their rivals something to worry about. After testing this board I have found that it competes with and wins in quite a few benchmark categories against its closest rivals from EPOX (EP-8KHA+) and ASUS to name a couple.

From the moment of bootup its stability came through, bios was simple and effective to use. For the standard user it has stability and a good layout for ease of setup for the first time builder, for the overclocker it has manual voltage and frequency selections through jumpers, though this can be done via bios also. Front side bus can be manipulated up to 300 MHz (150 external cpu clock) and it is stable at these speeds, (when appropriate cooling is used!) That is its main advantage, it is stable in every test and after every tweak I performed.

It has support for the latest harddrives with ata133(notably maxtor drives). It does have onboard ac97 sound and ac97 modem though these are not good enough for hardline gamers, these can be both disabled via the bios.

Bad points are that you have to be careful with installing large fans onto the cpus as a capacitor is very close to the rear side of the socket. The other is for people who want to still use there old sdram sticks, there is no support for these, but with current memory prices you're better off buying ddr now before the prices again rocket.

I bought one of these a few days ago due to my testing results and I do not regret it. Setup was easy with no awkward finger work needed to setup fiddly parts, first time boot up, auto detected everything correctly, cpu speed, drives, memory, FSB voltages needed for CPU etc. It even made my chip 50 MHz faster without any overclocking compared to my previous boards, Abit kt7a-raid to name one, (see other review). WinXP went in with no problems, all drivers detected and installed by OS (later upgraded from soltek). And after stressing the system on benchmark and processor/graphics runs for 8 hours last night it stood up to everything and was totally stable!!! Which is a rare thing with a lot of motherboards nowadays.

If your a newbie get this board because it will handle anything you throw at it, if your an overclocker junkie, get this because its so easy to get maximum speeds out of your processor and its still stable at 150MHz (300 MHz FSB), it is an overclockers dream.

Plus it comes with a standard soltek software package which includes PC-cillin 2000, virtual drive, partition magic 6 and drive image 4.0 all full version.