Soltek Motherboards

How are the new Soltek motherboards doing?? I've changed my mind a few times on what I want to get and this one seems to be in my price range: SL-85ERV2--Can't seem to find any reviews--Someone selling a Jetway version that looks almost identical to the Soltek on Ebay(check my other posts). Wondered what people think of the Soltek's..

I just helped a friend upgrade his system using this mobo - we added a celeron 1.7GHz, 256Mb of Twinmos PC2700 and a Radeon 9500 Pro as well. It took a while to get set up, but even after a couple of days of fiddling I still couldn't get the damned thing to reboot. Whether you tried ctrl-alt-del, rebooting from windows, MS-DOS, or from in the bios, the screen would just go blank and all IDE activity would cease. It feels a bit like a bios issue (I had one version of a bios for my old Asus A7V that gave exactly the same symptoms), but there aren't any more recent bioses out there so I couldn't try flashing to a newer one.

Still, it works fine other than that - just means that instead of rebooting you have to shut down and then power up again. It's got a well-featured bios, and the technical specifications are pretty impressive for the price. Stability-wise, it hasn't really been up and running for long enough to say, but it seems ok - other than that rebooting issue, I can't find anything to fault with it, and hopefully a bios update will deal with that.

Of course, you might not have that problem - it could be due to something else (PSU maybe), and I haven't heard any reviewers complain of anything similar. All in all, thumbs up from me

Can you lock the AGP/PCI bus??? or have you been able to get that deep into the bios yet???

I don't think you can lock it - I didn't get much chance to play around properly, tweaking it and such, as it took a while to get win98 and everything loaded. Unfortunately I'm now back at uni and my mate is still at home with his computer, so I can't answer any really specific questions, but I have spoken to him since and it sounds as though even with win98 (SE) it's rock solid

My soltek board has no options for locking the buses, although I'm assuming that it does so anyway (Soltek 85MIR-L). I've had a few issues with this board, although probably a lot different from the one you're talking about, such as no vcore control, VERY vague memory options, etc. I also had to RMA it once because my system became very unstable, I checked in the bios and noticed that my VCore was rather low (I was also running it stock this day). I turned it off and checked some things in the system, started it back up and VCore was even lower. It kept on getting lower every time I'd restart until finally it didn't have enough power to start back up :/ But, RMA'd it and the new one is working great thus far

PS - Just looked up that board on their site...noticed it's a VIA chipset...I highly recommend going with Intel chipsets on any P4 system! I know soltek has some regular ATX Intel based boards out there.

Not much for a review for the motherboard itself, but this may tick Intel board user a bit
http://iocombo.com/review/showreview.php?threadid=16