VIA KT266A Motherboard Roundup - January 2002
by Mike Andrawes on January 18, 2002 4:48 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Soltek SL-75DRV2
|
Soltek SL-75DRV2 |
|
|
CPU
Interface
|
Socket-A
|
|
Chipset
|
VT
8366A North Bridge
VT 8233 South Bridge |
|
Form
Factor
|
ATX
|
|
Bus
Speeds
|
100
- 200 MHz (1MHz increments)
|
|
Core
Voltages Supported
|
1.100
- 1.850V (in 0.025V increments)
|
|
AGP
Voltages Supported
|
1.5
/ 1/.6 / 1.7 V
|
|
DRAM
Voltages Supported
|
2.5
/ 2.6 / 2.7 V
|
|
Memory
Slots
|
3
184-pin DDR DIMM Slots
|
|
Expansion
Slots
|
1
AGP Pro Slot
6 PCI Slots 1 CNR Slot |
|
Onboard
RAID
|
N/A
|
|
Onboard
USB 2.0/IEEE-1394
|
N/A
|
|
Onboard
Audio
|
VIA
VT1611A AC97 CODEC
|
The SL-75DRV2, just like most other KT266A boards, features 3 DIMM slots. The board is quite stable when all DIMMs are populated. We encountered a few lockups when we set the memory to most aggressive settings, but by lowering them, the board became very solid again.
Inside the BIOS Soltek allows you to actually tweak the skew rate of the CPU, chip, PCI, and AGP. For CPU and chip the skew rate can be between 50 to 750ps in 50ps increments. For the PCI bus it could be between 100 to 1500ps in 100ps increments, whereas for the AGP bus the skew could be 100ps, 200ps, or 300ps. While we couldn't achieve any higher FSB speeds by tweaking these settings, it's nice for Soltek to go into the details.
We were also able to find the 100/133MHz memory bus settings inside the BIOS, which allowed us to push the FSB further without having the memory as the bottleneck. The SL-7DRV2 also offers to biggest varieties of voltage tweaks. Besides a decent range of voltages for CPU core and DDR memory, you can also tweak the AGP voltage, which in our case did help to maintain stability at some level.
Interestingly enough, we noticed that the CPU core voltage is always running a bit lower than the value specified, which could affect the system stability. On the other hand, the omission of an integrated IDE RAID controller does make the board a bit less attractive for those of you who are looking into RAID setup or having more than 4 IDE devices.
For the price of around 100 dollars, the SL-7DRV2 is a very good bang for the buck when overclocking.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
3 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Monday, September 29, 2003 - link
How do I get my Engine to Memory clock to run synchronous for my Epox 8kha+ boardxrror - Saturday, August 14, 2021 - link
This was such an exciting time in PC hardware. Intel was still trying to cram Rambus down the industry's throat - and obstinately trying to strong arm the mobo makers and force chipset makers to Rambus licensing. We still had VIA, SiS, ULi, and even nVidia in the chipset market, and with AMD's Athlon line still extraordinarily competitive and Intel in full attack they could no longer just consider AMD as a side-show - this was their leverage against Intel and they had to treat Socket A as premium platform.NegativeROG - Wednesday, June 15, 2022 - link
I still have this board. AND, I invested all of a $10,000 inheritance in Rambus RDRAM. I'm smarter now (I hope). But, you are right about exciting times in the PC space. I navigated away from AMD for a bit, but came back, and will stay forever. Team RED!