FIRST LOOK: Soltek 865Pro-775

The Soltek SL-865Pro- 775 is exactly what some of you have been looking for. You get to choose a new, faster Prescott LGA 775 processor and still use your AGP 8X video card and fast DDR memory. It is also nice that you can build this hybrid solution without really giving up anything in performance. Across all the game benchmarks and PCMark 2004, the Soltek was certainly competitive with the new mainstream 915 chipset. It either placed between the high-end 925X boards and the 915, or it the performance was right in line with the 915 results. Considering that DDR2 is running at 533 versus the 400 for DDR400, this close performance is pretty remarkable. As we have stated in other reviews, the higher latency of DDR2-533 offsets a lot of the gains from the speed increase.

Soltek positions the 865Pro-775 as a member of their high-end PRO series, and the feature set certainly fits. You get all the standard features found on other 865 boards like SATA and 8 USB ports, plus the enhanced features of additional Promise SATA and IDE ports, two firewire ports, and 6-channel AC97 2.2 audio. The BIOS options also support just about anything an average overclocker might want, which allows the 865Pro-775 to reach overclock levels many 915 boards can not begin to approach.