X-bit labs

Review of Soltek SL-86SPE-L Mainboard on i865PE Chipset (page 7)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

The available memory frequencies depend on the nominal FSB frequency of the processor, or on the corresponding jumpers position (other than Auto, of course). The table below will show you all of them:

We should point out that even though BIOS Setup sets exact frequencies for DDR266, DDR333 and DDR400, the actual memory frequency for non-standard FSB rates will be determined according to the selected divider (see the table above) and will not correspond to what BIOS Setup indicates.

Besides the memory frequency settings, this section of BIOS Setup also contains memory timings settings. There are also DRAM CAS Latency settings (2, 2.5, 3); DRAM Precharge Delay (5, 6, 7 or 8), DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay and DRAM RAS# Precharge, (2, 3 or 4). All in all, a pretty standard set.

In fact, we still should mention a few issues about the current BIOS version 1.1LB. when we tried to overclock a CPU on Soltek SL-86SPE-L, we discovered that when the memory timings or memory working frequency were set manually, the FSB frequency potential grew much lower. That is why if you want to successfully overclock your CPU to real heights, you should set the memory frequency to Auto, and the memory timings should necessarily be borrowed from SPD. Actually, this is a great drawback of Soltek SL-86SPE-L, which makes the CPU overclocking and performance fine tuning a really hard task. However, we hope that this problem will be eliminated in the new BIOS versions.

When we tested the efficiency of Soltek SL-86SPE-L overclocking friendly features, the above described problem prevented us from achieving really impressive results. When we set the memory frequency and timings manually, the maximum FSB frequency we managed to get during Pentium 4 2.4C overclocking was only 215MHz. To tell the truth, this is a very low result, because the same CPU on ASUS P4P800 reached 275MHz FSB. When we cleared the memory settings back to default, processor overclocking went on much better. In this case the maximum FSB frequency achieved equaled 262MHz. Although the tested processor still had some potential left, this result can be considered very good.

Hardware Health Configuration page on Soltek SL-86SPE-L contains quite a bit of useful info about the system functioning. For example, you can watch the CPU and system temperatures, CPU fan rotation speed, processor and battery Vcore and the PSU voltages (along all lines).