Soltek 75DRV5 KT333 Mainboard

The BIOS

The board uses a 2MB Award Flash Bios which includes some interesting features. Before continuing, we downloaded the latest revision and updated the BIOS.

The Bios allows for the usual memory tweaking options such as DRA< Timing, Cas Latency Command Rate etc. A new feature known as “DDSkew Level” was also introduced in this section. We’ll update this section as soon as we find out what this setting actually does.

The SmartDoc Anti-Burn Shield menu allows you to set the CPU and system shut down/warning temperatures. Before you can enable the CPU shutdown temperature, you must activate this feature by enabling the jumper in the mainboard

The most interesting feature in the BIOS is in the Frequency/Voltage adjust control. Soltek has introduced a feature called Red Storm Overclocking which will automatically overclock the CPU upto the safest possible level. I do not know how this system actually works as it only takes the board less than 2 seconds to understand whether a particular FSB setting will be stable or not. This is an ideal tool for all those budding Overclockers to try their hands at safe levels of overclocking. Once it reaches its maximum range it either reboots itself or the system freezes. Rebooting the system brings everything back up. After running the Red Storm feature the 75DRV5 reported that we could overclock the board to 152MHz safely without any problems. Our board worked fine at this setting as predicted by the board itself 🙂 and even after running some benchmarks for a few minutes it didn’t crash once.