After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.
Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com
Soltek SL-865Pro-775 (Hybrid) 'ProSeries' Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Thursday, August 12, 2004
Board Layout and Features
As mentioned before the SL-865Pro-775 supports socket LGA 775 processors with a FSB speed of 800/533. Heatsinks mount directly to the motherboard and are relatively large by comparison. As you can see the LGA socket is different from traditional processors in that the pins are no longer on the processor but rather in the CPU socket. Due to the inherent issues with this radical new design the retention system needed to be beefed up and redesigned.
The lower section of the SL-865Pro-775 is just like any other Springdale motherboard; it comes equipped with 1x AGP and 5x PCI slots and a huge number of external connections.
The Soltek Pro-775 motherboard comes with a 4-phase power supply to feed the power hungry Prescott processor. If you look carefully you will notice the use of the tiny MOSFET power transistors. These are the same items used on the upgraded DFI LanParty motherboards that we reviewed and are supposed to produce far less heat.
The stock cpu cooler features a thermally controlled fan. According to the Intel documentation the fan is controlled by the air temperature above the fan, thus implying that a thermal sensor is located there. While this may be true my research indicates that the fan is actually controlled by a temperature delta between the CPU and ambient air temp.
This would explain why the processor runs so hot. It was programmed to.
This would explain why the processor runs so hot. It was programmed to.
RAID Pro: is comprised of the Promise PDC20579 SATA RAID controller shown here. The PDC20579 is a 4-channel controller supporting up to 2 SATA connections and a single PATA connection with raid levels of 0, 1, 1+0, and JBOD (the fun one nobody ever uses)
Other onboard features like Network Pro: and Firewire are made up of these two VIA controller chips.