Six Athlon Boards With The KT600 Chipset

Soltek SL-KT600R: Not A Model Candidate

Board-Revision M2

Bios AA1RHB (07/02/2003)

Familiar packaging from Soltek

A glance at the connections

In the past, Soltek often supplied THG's tests with a persuasive offering. For this test, the manufacturer sent us the SL-KT600-R, a model that stands out above all for its meager offering. They also should have offered an active Northbridge cooler: during some benchmarks, such as 3D Mark 2003 and Quake III, the system suddenly crashed. An additional fan would help here to circulate air to the Northbridge, but is not included. From a purely technical point of view, the gold paint on the Northbridge cooler doesn't benefit anyone - the marketing people had too great a say on this. The cutbacks are really noticeable in the antiquated BIOS Flash chip from SST that is still confined to its 32-pin DIL package (1995). Practice has shown that the DIMM slots are placed too high at the same level as the AGP slot making assembly only possible once the graphics card has been removed. The own-brand Red Storm overclocking feature is worth mentioning. Theoretically, it returns the highest clock speed in combination with any Athlon CPU in the BIOS. Experience, however, shows that manual settings are more likely to lead to success. Besides for Serial ATA and IDE cables, the package also comes complete with power cables for the corresponding hard drives. A diskette contains drivers for the Serial ATA RAID on the VIA Southbridge. The whole Soltek package costs $77 (€70). In the benchmarks, the board delivered the second-worst results of the whole test field.