Soltek NV400-L64: Purple, Practical, AND Performance!
by Wesley Fink on August 11, 2003 10:26 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
When NVIDIA announced they would be introducing a single-channel version of their newest nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, it was clear that NVIDIA wanted a lower-priced offering to compete with VIA’s KT600 chipset. Since NVIDIA’s explosive growth in the Athlon chipset market, VIA has been fighting back with lower prices on their current and new chipsets. The nForce2 400, then, would be a lower-cost Northbridge, combined with the lower-end MCP Southbridge, to fight VIA without compromising NVIDIA’s top-line nForce2 Ultra 400/MCP-T offering.
This was all logical enough, and seemed like a good strategy for NVIDIA. The nForce2 400 would be a cheaper, entry-level chipset with lower single-channel performance - or so we thought! Imagine our surprise when early looks at the single-channel nForce2 400 chipset were reporting that the single-channel version was actually FASTER than the dual-channel nForce2 Ultra 400 in many situations. We had not planned for more than a news report of this "value" chipset, but with what we were hearing about the nForce2 400, we wanted to take a closer look ourselves at what all the fuss was about.
The name that was mentioned wherever we saw reports of the nForce2 400 chipset was Soltek, a name many of you may not know. While Soltek appears to be first to market with a single-channel nForce2 board, we have recently learned that Asus and Chaintech now have nForce2 400 offerings, and other companies may also be producing single-channel nForce2 boards in the near future.
Soltek is a name that is well-known to many in Asian markets. There, they have built a solid following and a reputation for building high-performance motherboards at reasonable prices. Soltek is less known in the US market, and this has been compounded by the ongoing reports of Soltek entering the US market and then withdrawing from the US market. Even with this confusion about US market presence, there have been several retailers who have consistently offered Soltek products in the US; so, they are available, but you have to search a bit to find them. Soltek was kind enough to provide AnandTech with their NV400-L64 motherboard, which was shipped to us from Taiwan.
While this is the first Soltek motherboard that we have evaluated at AnandTech, we are familiar with some of their products — particularly those produced for the Athlon CPU. Soltek was one of the first to market with an nForce2 Ultra 400 board called the SL-75FRN2. The Ultra 400 Soltek is bright yellow and called the "Golden Flame". This is typical of Soltek boards, which feature unusual colors and themes to stand out from the others in the market. More important than the appearance, however, the 75FRN2 series have developed a reputation as very good NF2 performers with excellent overclocking options and very good performance — even when overclocked.
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Anonymous User - Saturday, August 16, 2003 - link
Wesley -I thought the PCI bus runs at a fixed frequency and is independent from the AGP bus. In the review, it was stated that the PCI bus is half of the AGP bus. Is it possible that this could be confirmed with a hardware monitor that is capable of measuring the PCI bus speed? If not, from what source was the PCI bus speed information taken from?
Thanx for review! :D
Anonymous User - Friday, August 15, 2003 - link
#23, you're clueless. AnandTech still has the best motherboard, CPU and now memory reviews on the net. HardOCP does some of the best video card reviews on the net, a bit better than AnandTech, but that's mostly because Anandtech doesn't release any individual video card reviews. If they did, Anandtech would dominate CPU, motherboard, video AND memory reviews.Read other web sites before you belittle Anandtech for quality reviews.
LMAO at #24. Though your point could have been made better without the swearing. :)
Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link
Yeah Well ,This review is slightly amusing &Mildly Boring..
For all you new guys at AnandTech,
This place does not feel like "Home" anymore..
Oh yes ,its still my homepage ,after so many years.
The Place Might be Anand's - But it aint Anandtech no more...
THe reviews are lacking & incomplete - with too much cutting & pasting done all the time.
Many issues are just ignored ,
& it all feels so shallow.......
You Should Go Read "Old" Coppermine Area AnandTech Archives & get a grip on what this place used to be...
Please hear My (our?!) cry ..
Locutus4657 - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link
#5:What the heck are you talking about? Via? Better Stability?? You've obviously never looked into their white papers before.... More than 200 pages for the KT133 errata section alone. I'm sorry, It's worth getting fewer features for an nForce board. At least it will work.
Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link
Why is it that drivers get so little attention, but small differences in performance are blown up well beyond reasonable proportions? I'm talking about reviews all over the net now and not just Anandtech. It's just that the nForce drivers continuing mess doesn't get even a tenth of the attention that benchmarks in stupid programs like SiSoft Sandra get. (?!?)Wich bothers the users most, a few percentages here and there that doesn't show in practical use or driver issues that makes the regular user call his or her "techy" friend to come solve the issues.
Anonymous User - Thursday, August 14, 2003 - link
Actually, we are only on a limitted relationship with Crucial, Corsair, Kingston and Mushkin. They all send us lots of products, but its fairly easy to do considering how much (or how little) a stick of DDR costs.Evan Lieb - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link
In case anyone is wondering, all nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards from Epox, ASUS, ABIT, etc. vary on an average of 0-1.5% (max). In fact, Gigabyte's nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard (7NNXP) was ever so slightly faster than ASUS's A7N8X Deluxe rev. 2.0In other words, it serves no purpose to run benchmarks on 10 different nForce2 Ulra 400 motherboards if they all perform the same (unless it's a roundup of course).
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link
All our benchmarks are run at 1024x768 and at 32bit color if possible. We run the GunMetal 2 bench at default settings - which is audio enabled and 2X Anisotropic filtering. It has been common practice NOT to run Quake3 and other game benches with sound enabled due to the variation in scores caused by different sound chips. However with this new DX9 bench, we decided to run at default.Unfortunately, GunMetal 2 seems VERY video-card bound, and may not be a very useful benchmark for motherboard testing. It would appear a great choice, though, for testing video cards.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link
Wesley could you please state what settings the gunmetal benchs were run including the resolution, graphical settings ect.. I would like to compare my setup to your results. This info would be benificial if it was stated in the result graphic in the article. Thanks.Wesley Fink - Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - link
#14 - As we stated in #10 and #12, we recently completed retesting ALL recent reviews with our new ATI 9800 PRO video standard. When that was done, benchmarks for this review were updated and sent to our editor who does web-posting.Unfortunately, our web-editor posted the earlier tests. These have NOW been corrected and all reported benchmarks are with the 9800 PRO.
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