Soltek, purveyor of all things shiny and glittery, is one of the first companies to release a motherboard based around Intel’s eagerly anticipated i865 Springdale chipset. This board is the SL-86SEP-L, and it looks it could offer great value for those who wish to sample the delights of dual-channel DDR without paying the premium for an i875 motherboard.
As you saw in John’s feature on the i865 and i875 in last month’s Atomic, there is a minimal performance difference between these two chipsets, with the i865 being substantially cheaper than the flagship i875. This makes it the obvious choice for those looking to move up to the 200MHz FSB Pentium 4s but don’t want to pay the uber bucks to do so.
This motherboard uses the ICH5 Southbridge, which supports eight USB 2.0 ports, two Serial ATA ports, two ATA100 IDE ports and a couple of other things that are too boring to mention. Onboard sound and Ethernet support is provided courtesy of Realtek, but the sound isn’t anything to write to Mum about, providing basic 4.1 and a single input.
Board layout is fairly clean, although it does suffer from a problem that is becoming increasingly common these days; a full-sized AGP card comes mighty close to the clips used on the memory slots, meaning you have to remove your video card to detach your memory. The board is coated in a dull silver finish, making it very attractive to those with a Perspex fetish. A strange glitch saw the motherboard supplying a voltage to the CPU roughly 0.075V lower than what was set; however once you know about this bug it’s not a big problem to overcome.
Meh, sounds like a pretty standard i865 mobo, doesn’t it? Well, Soltek claims that this board was happy to run a massive 300MHz frontside bus (effectively 1,200MHz) was the reason that we first decided to check it out. Pairing it up with the beloved 2.4C, we managed to extract a maximum stable front side bus of 270MHz, but it’s impossible to say whether or not this was held back by the CPU or motherboard. Regardless, an effective FSB of 1,080MHz, 35% faster than it’s meant to run, is nothing to be sneezed at. Unfortunately this had a nasty side effect -- the memory would only run at 266MHz, with 333MHz and 400MHz causing lots of lovely BSODs. However, the performance increase from the FSB increase negates this slower memory frequency.
While this board has a couple of glitches, notably the memory timing and voltage reporting, it’s still very good value, and is a nice match with the 2.4C.