VIA was postponing the launch of its KT400 chipset for quite a long time, so that many mainboard manufacturers couldn’t wait any longer and launched their products based on VIA KT400 even though it wasn’t officially launched by then. Although the mainboards haven’t started selling yet, so there is some hope that the new chipset for Athlon XP will still be launched before the first mainboards appear on shop shelves.

Speaking about VIA being slow with its KT400 we would like to point out pretty strange situation with the implementation of DDR400 support. Theoretically, KT400 allows clocking the DDR memory bus for 200MHz, however, the company doesn’t guarantee that the chipset will work stably in this mode. The thing is that there is no DDR400 specification yet, and the DDR400 memory modules available in the market differ a great lot from one another, including situations when some of them turn out incompatible with the VIA KT400 based mainboards.

In this respect the mainboard makers have to resort to various tricks when speaking about the memory types supported by their KT400 based solutions. Some of them claim full compliance with the unofficial DDR400 SDRAM standard without going into details about the stability; some of them prefer to keep silent about the DDR400 support saying that KT400 based boards work only with DDR333.

However, there appeared to be one more way-out in this case. This solution was introduced by Soltek Company, which has recently announced its new KT400 based Socket A mainboard aka SL-75FRV. Together with the new product launch Soltek announced the beginning of DDR400 validation program aimed at confirming the compatibility of SL-75FRV with DDR400. This way the manufacturers guarantees that their product will work with DDR400 but only if you use one of the memory modules checked by the company (the list of these modules will be constantly updated on Soltek’s web-site).

Speaking about the other features of SL-75FRV, we have to mention that it will use VT8235 South Bridge, support Soltek’s brand ABS II Anti-Burn Shield technology, feature 3 DIMM slots for DDR memory, an AGP 8x and 5 PCI slots. Besides, it will be equipped with 6-channel AC’97 sound and support USB 2.0 and ATA/133. There will also be a special version of this mainboard aka SL-75FRV0L with the integrated 10/100Mbit Fast Ethernet controller. Like all other Soltek products, SL-75FRV will boast a set of overclocking friendly functions: FSB, Vcore, Vagp and Vdimm adjustment.

Again, no info is available on the shipping schedule and pricing.