Soltek SL-75FRN-RL Review

Intro

There are oodles of nforce2 motherboards out there today!  Which one is the best for you though?  If you're on a budget, Soltek may have an answer for you!  This particular board can be for found as cheap as $90 on some sites!  But don't let the price fool you, it's got quite a few features and is a very solid board.  And if yellow is your color, then this board is definitely for you!  When I first had the board in my hands I had to put some sunglasses on the yellow as so bright!  :P  Actually, it won't blind you, but if you're doing a yellow schemed computer, this board would make a great centerpiece!

Another thing I wanted to note about Soltek is that many people may not think blazing performance and overclocking when they think of Soltek.  In actuality though, that a guy named Mace actually hit the highest bandwidth on a KT333/KT400 board and had the highest KT400 based PCMark2002.  Very impressive for a company not known for overclocking eh?  After Maces very good experience I decided to check out Soltek's NF2 offering and see if they did as good on it as they did on their KT400 board.

Features & Layout

Soltek has a few different NF2 motherboard models, and I believe this is the most loaded one.  This model gives you Serial ATA and single channel IDE Raid.  It has onboard sound, but personally I won't be using it.  I did try it out and it sounds pretty good, but I prefer using my GTXP5.1 soundcard.  You also get some bundled software and some nifty utilities.  The hardware monitoring program I found to be a little wacky.  Mind you the program works great, but I did find the interface to be quite silly looking!

The layout of this board is good!  You've got your power connectors in a decent spot.  Some people may not like it because you have to snake your power cables around your heat sink, but in the case I had it in, snaking the wires wasn't a problem.  As you can see by the picture below, the SL-75FRN-RL has a nice heat sink on the Northbridge and it cools sufficiently.  Also, I was pleased to see a good amount of thermal grease.  Some companies are skimping on thermal grease, and for someone not modding their cooling on the Northbridge, that could turn out to be a problem.  

I do have an issue with how Soltek handled powering the fan for the Northbridge.  They use a 3-pin plug on the motherboard which I don't like.  Often manufacturers will add a special smaller plug for a Northbridge fan which Soltek should have done so that power plug could have been used for a case fan.  My thinking is that a motherboard should have a plug on the bottom right, the middle left, and near the CPU.  So you can power one intake and one exhaust fan, and your CPU fan.  So, if you're just using air cooling in your system and you have a lot of fans you'll need to get a Y adapter or a rheobus.  This may seem like a small problem, but it did affect my system, so I'm sure it will affect others.  Other than that, the layout is very good and I was pleased with it.

EDIT: I received an email asking about the lack of four holes around the socket.  I tell ya, I totally forgot about that!  Yes this board does not have four holes around the socket as you can see, but it didn't affect me (which is why I forgot about it) as I used a heat sink that utilized the socket clips.

The way the board is though, with it's features and abilities (you'll see on page 2) it really doesn't need four holes.  As the bios only allows for 211mhz fsb, "serious" overclockers would probably purchase a board that has 250mhz and four holes such as the A7N8X or NF7-S 1.2 or others.  But, I think this board appeals to the "middle of the road" overclocker who wants to get some more juice out of it, but not have to put a peltier on his chipset and a Prometeia on his CPU.  If you're just air cooling, this board is still great.  You can slap on an SLK-800A and go to town :)

Pictures

Overview shot	The loverly nforce2 core	Thermal goop!  Wee!

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