Blast from the Soltek Past

Jumpers.

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How we used to overclock.

At least that's how I had to do it when I overclocked my 286 from 8Mhz to 12Mhz, my 486sx25 to 50Mhz and all of my Socket 7 Pentium and K6 based systems.

And for this reason we all need to bow our heads and say a prayer of thanks to, the now dearly departed, Abit, whose motherboards helped put numerous jumper makers out of business.
 
Jumpers.

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How we used to overclock.

At least that's how I had to do it when I overclocked my 286 from 8Mhz to 12Mhz, my 486sx25 to 50Mhz and all of my Socket 7 Pentium and K6 based systems.

Of course, my first overclock involved actually changing out the socketed crystal oscillator on my 4.77Mhz XT board when I swapped the CPU to an 8Mhz rated NEC V20 and put in a 10Mhz crystal.

Actually, I remember changing out 4 prong canned oscillators on Novas boards well up into the 486DX-50 days -- and the good old days of Chips & Technologies (C&T) chipsets and the hey day of Microid Research "MR BIOS" (which, back in the 486DX/DX2/DX4/etc era was one of the first BIOS's that allowed the same board to support different oscillator to CPU clock multipliers without requiring actual BIOS changes -- https://www.google.com/patents/US5572716).
 
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Real men don't use window cases. End of.

Windows can actually be quite useful to keep track of water levels in custom water loops, but other than that I agree with you.

Before I built my first water loop I intentionally shopped for cases without windows. (Didn't always find ones I liked, but I tried.)
 
Of course, my first overclock involved actually changing out the socketed crystal oscillator on my 4.77Mhz XT board when I swapped the CPU to an 8Mhz rated NEC V20 and put in a 10Mhz crystal.

Actually, I remember changing out 4 prong canned oscillators on Novas boards well up into the 486DX-50 days -- and the good old days of Microid Research "MR BIOS".

Now that's old school and badass. I never did that, but I had a friend who replaced the crystal oscillator in order to overclock his Amiga.

For me it was way more simple. My 286 overclocked by just moving the jumper. Nothing else required.

My 486 was almost as easy. It just needed me to add an HSF. (It didn't have one stock, just a bare chip)
 
oh god...

just had a memory of my first high end motherboard come screaming back

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what ever happened to cardboard coloured motherboards?
 
Ha ha ... this is such a timely thread since I have been busting out all my old Soltek hardware building a retro nForce2 gaming rig. Built several with various brands back in the day, including several NF7-S, but Soltek was always my favorite. Great overclockers. Shame they had no holes around the socket. Made water cooling almost impossible.

Reviewed board had no serial sockets because it is not the RL (SATA/RAID) model.

Soltek was a great company to deal with. We all remember the capacitor plague that affected the general market. If memory serves, Soltek was the only board company that would send you a free re-cap kit on request, regardless if your board failed or not. Took advantage of that offer myself though never had to use them. And they were good about updating their board design. Can remember no less that 5 revisions. The last one, "AP" had good Japanese brand caps and eliminated that silly DA-15 gameport in favor of two extra USB..

Here are two that I have been working with lately. "E3" on left was my main system for over 10 years. One on right is virgin "AP". Just fired that one up for very first time a few days ago. Golden Flame in these are pretty rare. Most were Purple by then.
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Here is the Purple version - SL-75FRN2-L, also non SATA/RAID. More ugly than the sparkly Golden Flame in my opinion. Would have been better if they used purple slots like they did with some of the earlier VIA based Purple Ray boards.
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I have an AMD Athlon 64 system running my MameCab from around 2005....its running Windows98......because that's what that build of mame32 likes....and the whole thing is now on hardware that's approaching comical levels of end-of-life......at some point a cap is going to pop or a bearing will seize in a key fan, and I'll have to figure out how to rebuild it without having to scour the four-corners to find a new compatible version of mame....I am not looking forward to that day :p
 
nForce2 Chipsets.
DDR-1 400 memory
ATA-133
Barton 2500+ CPUs that almost 100% overclocked to 3200+ with a mere flip of a BIOS switch

Those were the fucking days.

As far as 'pretty' motherboards, I had a Soyo Dragon that was colorful (this guy: http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/show.html?cat=motherboards&rev_id=1176&page=2 )
Supposed to be a 'premium' board, but as I recall it took a shit relatively quickly :(
 
I had a couple soyo boards. They were awesome back in the day. They were both slot 1s with coppermine 800mhz CPU's. I could probably find one of them downstairs. I have a dual fan alpha heatsink on it too. I know I overclocked it but I can't remember how fast it was anymore.
 
Nforce brings me some bad memories was always buying new boards, I remember having tons of issues with static electricity and things getting fried in the winter. Epox 8RDA+ Nforce2 was one of my favorites although much plainer looking. Looking up reviews from then seeing Quake III arena at 1024/768 and 300FPS remember when that was mind blowing? Although the overclocking high for me was Pentium MMX 166mhz you could sometimes get over 50% OC's on them.
 
I too had an NF7-S, and before that the legendary ECS K7S5A... or maybe it was the other way around. Was the NF7-S the one with the bad caps?

IIRC, I received a NF7-S as a settlement for an earlier Abit slot A board that did have the leaking cap problem.
 
How we used to overclock.
At least that's how I had to do it when I overclocked my 286 from 8Mhz to 12Mhz, my 486sx25 to 50Mhz and all of my Socket 7 Pentium and K6 based systems.
Please, you ain't overclocked 'till you swapped out some crystals, like on those damn Adaptec SCSI HAs :D
 
Ahhh ... nostagilia city. Found a pic from back in the day = dated November 2003. As I remember, your top pick review was a principal reason I decided on Soltek.

Used to overclock the piss out of these things with the OCZ RAM booster. Remember those?

Here I had ATI 9500, Hauppauge PVR 350 capture card, and my 1st SATA drive. 36gb 10k RPM Seagate Barracuda. Still have everything shown. Except that particular board. Gave up the ghost years ago.
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Ahhh ... nostagilia city. Found a pic from back in the day = dated November 2003. As I remember, your top pick review was a principal reason I decided on Soltek.

Used to overclock the piss out of these things with the OCZ RAM booster. Remember those?

Here I had ATI 9500, Hauppauge PVR 350 capture card, and my 1st SATA drive. 36gb 10k RPM Seagate Barracuda. Still have everything shown. Except that particular board. Gave up the ghost years ago.
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Makes me wish I had a camera back then. The things I would have taken pictures of.
 
The contrast helps when your eyes get old. Don't laugh. I used to have great eyesight a few years ago. My new Z270 is a black motherboard in a sea of black cables and components. Flashlights, cussing and reading glasses...

I can agree with this. My PC is in a corner of the room where if I stand there to work on it I block the light.

And moving a loaded 900D around is never fun.
 
My favorite motherboard of that era was the DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra-b.

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I had a great time with this board and did get better overlocks with it than any of the other boards of the time. Sadly, it just gave up the ghost one day out of the blue which was really sad. I had to go back to my less good Asus A7N8x-deluxe. It really annoyed me because I think I had to drop 100mhz off the overlock of my Barton mobile 2400+. I did get lucky with the Asus board. After the first RMA I didn't have to RMA it again which was a real rarity for me and one of the reasons I stay away from Asus board. I always had to RMA the damn things at least twice. I will say that the DFI board was definitely the most expensive motherboard I have ever purchased. Even now I've never spent $170 on a motherboard.
 
Hehehe I still miss my Epox board. That and my Athlon 1700+ I had around a 50% OC on that thing on my watercooling setup

Damn near had the same thing,the Epox i had was wonderful and it was a great price, except I had an 1800+ on Air, the heatsink/fan was called the tornado I believe it was, that thing was SO fucking loud. But I cant for the life of me remember which nvidia card I had in it and it drives me crazy trying to remember!

Here is the Purple version - SL-75FRN2-L, also non SATA/RAID. More ugly than the sparkly Golden Flame in my opinion. Would have been better if they used purple slots like they did with some of the earlier VIA based Purple Ray boards.
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I had forgotten they had started to put those little pads on the CPUs.....because some heatsinks took about 50 pounds of force to clip on. lol I honestly dont know how my AMD survived all the times i took that thing on and off.
 
I sold a ton of those in my computer shop days - many of them due to the stellar review on here. However, after about 6 months, they started coming back with blown capacitors....
 
Did anyone have the Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition? It was silvery.

It's also a demonstration on how far tech has come. You can't have too many USB ports nowadays :), SATA instead of PATA, PCI-Express instead of AGP, and if your motherboard has a parallel and/or serial port, it's a header, not part of the back end.
 
I can agree with this. My PC is in a corner of the room where if I stand there to work on it I block the light.

And moving a loaded 900D around is never fun.

I've got a CoolerMaster Cosmos II, and I've got 8 drives in it, Corsair HX850, a Master Liquid Pro 240, as well as a shit tone of expansion cards... curling that up onto my work table is something you warm up for before attempting.
 
Back in those days I was all about the ABit NF7-S and the ECS K7S5A. I got rid of both boards years ago, but I still have the NF7-S's box somewhere that I'm using to store a truly ancient KIM-1 along with its manuals and schematics.

The K7S5A was a great $40 overclocking motherboard as long as you were good with soldering. In the right hands that board could do incredible things for the price.
 
Sometimes I think fondly of my ASUS A7V133 with Athlon 1GHz computer I spent almost all my money on while in college.

It was the first computer I built. I spent several thousands of hours on it.

That was a fun, exciting time.
 
I got rid of an intel brand mobo for those P2 cassette type CPU's a while back, think it was the first and last intel branded mobo I bought :D
 
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