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BIOS
Ah, bet you can't guess what I'm going to write here. If infact you even got this far without skipping to the end of the review and the conclusions. For those that have persevered, I award you with the same old commentary about it being your usual AWARD KT400A fare with Soltek's bits and pieces.
Those bits and pieces are, in no real order of excitement, 1.1 to 1.85V Vcore range in tiny increments, 1.5 to 1.8V Vagp (still struggling to see why, even when half the boards here provide it) and DDR voltage adjust from 2.5 to 2.8V. Standard compared to everyone else. We've got CPU multiplier adjust in the BIOS for unlocked processors to take advantage of. FSB adjust is limited to ranges and those ranges are set on the motherboard via a jumper block. There's a 200MHz setting, but choosing it didn't do anything with the XP3200+ test processor, not even a sniff of a boot or part of a POST.
There's some interesting extra settings exposed with Soltek's BIOS, mostly related to DDR memory control. There's three settings called DDR performance register, Rank interleaver & and Timing control and finally FSB performance register. In the absence of time to test them fully along with no proper explanation of their function, I elected to leave each one at its factory shipped setting.
Bundle
Despite a definite middle of the road tack as far as the feature set was concerned, Soltek attempt to valiantly make up for it with the bundle. In the Matrix style box (I'm surprised Soltek are the only manufacturer to ship a Matrix inspired packaging set) you get the following: single IDE and floppy cable (2 IDE would have been nice), CD with software and hardware drivers, software CD including Partition Magic and Drive Image, a seperate printed manual just for that software, quickstart guide (well written and illustrated) and a warranty card for worldwide replacement.
Overall, a nice bundle. The software is genuinely useful and nice to see, along with the trouble of bundling a proper manual for it all. Lack of another IDE cable to make use of the second provided PATA port is all that's lacking really. No USB2.0 in the review sample box, but I'm assured they are in the retail box package and you'll get them with yours.
Manual
Nothing super exciting here, but the manual is easy to read, navigate and it's presented in the same Matrix style as the packaging. It looks like the days of a bad manual are behind us and about time too.
Midway Conclusion
Not a huge amount of features but a good bundle to appease this reviewer, the software bundle especially. It's a clean layout too, no real problems with it that don't feature on at least half of the other boards in this roundup. When choosing whether to deviate much from the VIA reference design, it seems like only the larger companies like MSI and Gigabyte have the resources to do anything with it and move things about. We can't criticise the smaller makers for not having the ability to do the same.
I think that means we are done with the chat about the boards. 19 pages in and not a benchmark in sight. Well, close but not quite. Just one more page covering general setup issues encountered with each board, and oddities not already covered, to bring us up to a nice round 20 pages of comprehensive board coverage and then we can take a week long break in Marbella before digesting the benchmarks.
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