Cooling

Soltek does not include any CPU cooling with the EQ3501, so it'll be up to you to supply your own cooler. The CPU socket is located just beneath the PSU, and we were able to fit Intel's stock cooler with about an inch of clearance under the power supply, and about a half inch all around. In addition to the CPU cooling, Soltek does include their IcyQ cooler which does a good job of venting out case heat. Given our past experiences with the K8T800 Pro based Mania, we had some concerns about the EQ3501, but the temperatures seemed to be in line with what we typically experienced with Intel's cooler.

	IcyQ On	IcyQ Off
Case Open	57°C	57°C
Case Closed	69°C	73°C

With the Mania fully closed, the temperatures were a good 12°C higher than with it open. This is pretty much the average compared to what we've seen with the stock cooler in a standard sized case. The IcyQ makes the biggest impact with the case closed and is ineffective if you choose not to close the Mania up. We did have some concerns the P4 560 used for testing would clock throttle under load but the system ran at full speed during all our tests and did so with remarkable stability.

BIOS

Soltek's BIOS allows a fair amount of tweaking, offering many adjustments found on full-sized overclocking boards. Diving right into the Advanced Chipset Features, there are some adjustments the user can make to optimize system performance. The Advanced CPU Settings page will probably be useless for most of you unless you're lucky enough to have an unlocked Pentium 4 processor. The only other item of note on this page is the Hyper Threading option (all LGA775 CPUs support this) which should be left at Enabled unless you like crippling your system performance for the heck of it.

Under the Soltek Performance options, you have access to your Front Side Bus frequencies. Leaving things at Auto will allow you to manually tweak the CPU Clock which is a bit bizarre in our opinion. The default setting is 200MHz, but you can go up 1MHz adjustments between the ranges of 201MHz - 350MHz.

The CPU Linear Frequency is Enabled by default, but disabling it will allow you to dynamically overclock the CPU depending on the conditions. This is Soltek's Smart Acceleration Technology and your options are Disabled, Enhance, Performance, and Maximum Mode.

Under the North Bridge Configuration page, you have some memory options. The DRAM Frequency options are Auto, 333MHz and 400MHz, so if you have DDR memory in excess of 400MHz, "Auto" is your best choice. Disabling the SPD option will unlock the timings. For your CAS# Latency, options are 2, 2.5 and 3. RAS# to CAS# delay, and RAS# Precharge can be set from 2.0 to 5.0. The RAS# Activate to Prec scale goes from 4 to 15 in 1 clock steppings.

The voltage options are decent for a SFF. For the Chipset, maximum voltage tops out at 1.8v, while the DDR maxes out at 2.9v. For the CPU, your options range from 1.425 to 1.60 in 0.0125v increments.

Test Setup

Soltek EQ3501-300P: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200XL, ATI Radeon X800XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1.

MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X800XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1.

Going up against the Soltek EQ3501-300P will be the MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (another i915 based board). The setups all share the same peripheral components, and onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for both boards, but not used during game testing. All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each setup.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004 -A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests, higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2003 & 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. Bench'emAll was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

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