VIA and SiS Battle for Supremacy: 3-way P4 DDR Motherboard Roundup

Soltek 85ERV

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The Soltek 85ERV packs quite a plain set of features and options, in addition to utilizing VIA’s P4X400 chipset.

The 85ERV adds support for as many as 6 USB 2.0 ports and includes other features like AC’97 sound and lots of room for expansion with 6 PCI slots in addition to as much as 3.0 GB of DDR333 memory.

The 85ERV also comes with some nice overclocking options. Some of these include adjustable FSB speeds in 1MHz increments all the way up to 200MHz, VDIMM options up to 2.8V, and Vcore adjustments as high as 1.85V. Unfortunately, this board did not have an option for locking the AGP and PCI buses at 66MHz/33MHz as we had hoped.

The 85ERV’s layout is fairly well thought out. One of the layout choices we were pleased to see added to this board was a plastic plate beneath the CPU Socket. This is an important feature for Pentium 4 motherboards, as pressure from your CPU’s heatsink may bend your board, which isn’t exactly ideal. This is more of an issue for the larger Pentium 4 heatsinks that don’t necessarily follow Intel’s guidelines for pressure and mounting. Admittedly, we have not heard of any major incidents where pressure from the CPU heatsink on the motherboard caused serious damage but it is a good precaution.

Another addition we liked to see was the placement of capacitors around the heatsink. In the 85ERV’s case, the placement of the capacitors was such that uninstalling the heatsink was a breeze, since the capacitors weren’t impeding the uninstallation of the heatsink clamps.

We do have some complaints about the layout of this board, although they’re quite minor ones. For example, just as with the Shuttle AS45GTR, the placement of the DIMM slot connectors are just a little too close to the AGP slot. If you’re using a video card about the length of a GeForce3 or Radeon 8500, you may have to remove the card to insert your RAM. We also would have liked to have seen an AGP retention hook to hold the video card in place, although that’s not too major of an issue for most end users since it’s rare that you ship your computer around.

Again, Prime95 was our application of choice for stress testing the Soltek 85ERV. After nearly 24 hours, the Soltek board was able to successfully complete all Prime95 torture tests we ran. Just as we did with previous motherboards, we adjusted the Samsung DDR333 memory timings to more aggressive settings like CL2 and Turbo mode. The Soltek board handled it like a champ.

As we mentioned before, all 3 retail boards we tested could not reliably operate DDR400 memory. The Soltek 85ERV is no different. We were unable to complete any benchmarks with the Twinmos memory, and the system in general was just unstable with DDR400. The issues with DDR400 with this board were more severe than the VPSD P4PB 400 and Shuttle AS45GTR’s issues were with DDR400, but in all 3 cases, none were particularly stable.

As we expected, we encountered numerous problems once we filled all 3 DIMM slots with DDR333 memory. General system stability was unpredictable; sometimes we would be able to run general applications and complete certain benchmarks, and sometimes the system would randomly reboot or just freeze.

The debut price of the Soltek 85ERV should be around $100. Even though that’s not too bad of a deal for what you get, there are many other boards on the market with better features for close to the same price. Just about any 845E/G board and most 645DX/648 boards come with better features and options than the Soltek 85ERV does, and for a very similar price. And even if you aren’t into onboard features, there are better plain-vanilla boards to choose from than Soltek 85ERV.