Box of goodies...

     The box was literally overflowing with goodies. Soltek included some nice color coordinated cables, one of them a rounded IDE cable. The bundle includes a pair of SATA data cables and a "Y" cable for powering SATA hard drives. Of course there was also a nice set of easy to follow instructions and a well written manual. Soltek is one of the very few companies who actually includes a software pack with the motherboard. On the utilities disk you will find PC-cillin 2004, Virtual Drive 7, RestoreIT! 3 Lite, Partition Magic 6.0 SE, and Drive Image 4.0. Soltek even has their own Utility for overclocking the motherboard while in Windows called RedStorm2.

SL-PT880Pro-FGR up close

     The Soltek SL-PT880Pro-FGR is definitely one of the prettiest motherboards I've seen. The purple and black go very well together. Owners of this board should show it off in a case with a nice window mod.

     The layout of the motherboard is pretty much the same as the lastest batch of  i865 and i875 motherboards we've reviewed. The floppy connector is on the bottom, with the Serial ATA connectors just above it. The board has a total of 4 SATA drive connectors. Sporting no less than 2 SATA controllers, one is built into the Southbridge chipset, and the second is provided by an onboard Promise PDC20378 controller. Directly above the SATA connectors are the IDE and IDE RAID connectors. As you can see, they are all in one corner of the motherboard which really helps in the neatness department.

     One thing I was unsure of was if this board actually had Dual Channel DDR. We heard rumors that VIA PT880 chipset based motherboards would not have Dual Channel DDR. I'm happy to report that is totally untrue. This board has Dual Channel DDR, and it is extremely fast.

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