Like all motherboards that come across my desk, I had to inspect the Northbridge chipset. Surprisingly, I discovered that Soltek is actually using a good thermal compound between the heatsink and the chipset. Most manufacturers use "frag tape" which is a very poor conductor of heat. Thermal paste is by far a better solution and I must commend Soltek for taking the time to use it.

VIA PT880 Chipset

RedStorm 2 Overclocking Utility

     Earlier in the review I mentioned out this motherboard comes with a very nice software pack. One of the utilities included is called Redstorm 2. This is a nice little program that I have messed with in the past that allows a novice user to overclock the board while in Windows. This is a fail safe way to keeps the inexperienced user from tampering with the bios settings. The left side of the interface is where you can manually set the bus speed. On the right you can auto overclock. Auto Overclocking simply keeps raising the bus speed until the board fails. All this tells you is where the breaking point of the board is. The nice thing about RedStorm is that it does not hard set the bus speed, therefore if you go to high and the system fails, you simply reboot the system and your right back where you started from. Again, this is the perfect program from those new to overclocking.

     A new version of RedStorm 2 was released while I was writing this review. You can download it here.