Soltek SL-86SPE-L 865PE Motherboard

Company: Soltek
Product: SL-86SPE-L
Street Price: Unavailable
Date Reviewed: May 27, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Conclusions and Final Thoughts:

Price and Features:
This motherboard is not the most feature rich we have seen. In fact, it has far less features than what we would have expected. The 865PE chipset offers a number of the features that the motherboard does have. The rest of the bundle is a little weak. Only two USB ports can be found anywhere in the whole package and there is no FireWire support. We could not find a price on this motherboard at the time of this review. This could be due to the board being so new. For now, we cannot say if the price reflects what you get.

Performance:
The performance is good. The SL-86SPE-L performs right on line with the ABIT IS7. The features like Dual Channel memory controller, 800 MHz FSB, and Hyperthreading make this board a good choice for gamers and entry level workstations. It is always good to remember that these benchmarks are not showing the true performance gains from the 800 MHz FSB, Dual Channel memory, or Hyperthreading since we are not stressing enough of the subsystem to show a gain.

Stability:
We did not have any problems with stability during the course of this review. The board remained 100% stable during all of our benchmark testing. The drivers, even though very new, are very stable and could only get better with time. We did a little testing with a few different types of memory and all of them worked fine in a dual channel configuration without giving us blue screens or random reboots.

Support:
The Soltek website provides some support for the motherboard. All of the drivers like the chipset and sound can be found on their downloads page. Manual and BIOSes are also downloadable from the Soltek site. They also have a FAQ page for specific models of their motherboards. For further questions or help, an e-mail address is provided to contact Soltek support directly.

Overclocking:
Our overclocking experience with the mainboard was good. We were able to get 265 MHz system clock. This is over 1 GHz FSB (quad pumped). The overclocking capabilities of this motherboard are somewhere along the lines of the ABIT IS7. The voltages are good for the VCore and VDIMM. It would have been nice to see a little higher voltage options for the VDIMM, like up to 3V, but 2.8 should do fine for most users. The extreme overclockers out there might want to volt mod or go with a different board.

Overall:
This is a good motherboard. We expect the price to be very competitive with other boards based on the same chipset. It has all the performance benefits of the 865PE chipset, but not all the bells and whistles like FireWire and RAID. Soltek has done a fair job with this motherboard but for now our main concern is price since we were not able to get a quote. Either way, we are only disappointed that not many extra features were included but the SL-86SPE-L gets the job done.