X-bit labs

Review of Soltek SL-86SPE-L Mainboard on i865PE Chipset (page 4)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/24/2003 | 11:28 AM ]

PCB Design

The first thing that catches your eye when you take Soltek SL-86SPE-L is the PCB color. It is not for nothing that they call it Violet Eyes. SL-86SPE-L is really of dark-violet color. They created this coloring by sputtering the corresponding matt lacquer and using violet slots. Soltek gave up multi-color slots and ATA connectors: everything is violet now. However, it is exactly why Soltek SL-86SPE-L looks very stylish and impressive. The owners of transparent cases should simply love it!

Very unusual exterior is not the only advantage of Soltek SL-86SPE-L design. Since there are not too many additional controllers onboard, all PCB components are located in a very clever and reasonable way. The connectors for Parallel ATA HDDs are in front of the DIMM slots together with the main ATX power supply connector. The 12V ATX connector is placed closer to the back mainboard edge, between the CPU socket and the AGP slot, just like on many other mainboards. As for the FDD connector, it is not in front of the DIMM slots, which is a typical location for it, but is moved to the left edge in front of the PCI slots. On the one hand, this is not the best place for it, because the FDD cable will be disturbing the PCI expansion cards. But on the other hand, this location will allow minimizing the FDD cable length in most cases. Also the SerialATA connectors placed next to the FDD connector may cause some problems for the PCI expansion cards.

We would also like to give special credit to Soltek for placing the connectors for additional USB 2.0 ports in a very convenient location. They are on the left edge, behind the last PCI slot, where they definitely will not be in the way.

However, since there are 6 PCI slots onboard, the AGP slot is too close to DIMM slots, blocking the clips. As you know it will not allow you to do anything with the DIMM modules, before you remove the AGP card from the slot. However, with Soltek SL-86SPE-L you will have this problem only if you use very long-sized graphics cards (larger than ATI RADEON 9700 PRO, for instance), because the DIMM slots of Soltek’s mainboard are moved very far to the front edge.

Although the North Bridge of i865PE chipset can easily do with a passive cooler, Soltek equipped it with a small active cooler. In fact, this solution hardly has any disadvantages. The fan of this cooler rotates at around 3,000rpm creating almost no noise at all. Besides, the fan is equipped with a fan rotation speed sensor, but this parameter is not monitored on Soltek SL-86SPE-L.

The processor voltage regulator of Soltek SL-86SPE-L is based on a three-channel circuit. It uses powerful MOSFETs and big filter capacitors, so we really hope that the CPU receives highly “clean” current. Also the memory slots use impulse voltage regulator. All this indicates that Soltek engineers paid due attention to the stability of their solution under high workloads (with high-frequency processors and four DDR400 memory modules).