X-bit labs

Review of Soltek SL-86SPE-L Mainboard on i865PE Chipset (page 5)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Strange as it might seem, but Soltek SL-86SPE-L still uses jumpers. Many manufacturers have already moved all configuration settings to the BIOS Setup, but not Soltek. Besides the Clear CMOS jumper, the mainboard also features a jumper disabling the network controller on the hardware level. And which is even more strange, there are two jumpers setting the processor bus frequency!

These jumpers allow setting the default processor frequency and feature four positions: Auto, 100MHz, 133MHz and 200MHz. Although we were very much surprised to see them onboard, we have to admit that these two jumpers are a great advantage of Soltek SL-86SPE-L. On the one hand, you can disregard them completely by setting them into Auto position. But on the other hand, they allow squeezing extra performance out of the board by enabling the so-called PAT technology.

As we have already discovered in our ASUS P4P800 Mainboard Review, in reality when the processor bus frequency is 800MHz and we use DDR400 SDRAM, the bypass path (non-optimized algorithm) is enabled in i865PE. This path involves additional buffers and slows down the functioning speed. In our case with Soltek SL-86SPE-L we can use the above mentioned jumpers to manually change that bus frequency, which the chipset considers to be the default frequency for the given CPU. In other words, if you use a CPU with 800MHz bus with Soltek SL-86SPE-L and set the jumpers into “Auto” or “200MHz” position, the performance of our system will be slowed down by the enabled bypass path. If we set the jumpers into “133MHz” position and then overclock the FSB to 200MHz by using the overclocking friendly options available in BIOS Setup, the mainboard will use the standard shorter path for addressing the memory. It will actually mean that we enabled PAT technology, because the chipset will think that the nominal FSB frequency set for this CPU is 133MHz.

To prove our statements, let us offer you the results of a few tests. We tested Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor with 200MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM with 2-2-2-5 timings. We also used ATI RADEON 9700 PRO graphics card. We used different settings to adjust the FSB frequency:

• Jumpers: Auto; FSB frequency in BIOS Setup: Auto.
• Jumpers: 133MHz; FSB frequency in BIOS Setup: 200MHz.

The resulting FSB frequency equaled 200MHz in both cases, but the performance turned out different. Have a look:

The performance increase is evident. And we managed to achieve this by performing the trick described above: enabling PAT on Soltek SL-86SPE-L.

But unfortunately, we have to admit that when the jumpers are set to “133MHz” position and the FSB is overclocked to 200MHz, the mainboard was not so stable, as we hoped it would be. We even failed to run all the benchmarks we wanted. But we are sure that Soltek will cure this problem in the future and the new revisions of the BIOS Setup will allow using PAT technology to the full extent. Especially, since the existing BIOS Setup version has some other problems connected with incorrect memory configuring. We are going to dwell on them later in this article.