The Soltek SL-75FRN-L Motherboard Throwback

One of the coolest motherboards I reviewed back in the early days was the Soltek SL-75FRN-L, or Golden Flame.  This was a NVIDIA nForce 2 based motherboard supporting AMD XP based processors.  The “Golden Flame” name came from the unique gold PCB, gold anodized North Bridge heatsink and yellow expansion slots.

What made the motherboard so fun was the dual channel DDR memory support from the chipset and the ability to unlock AMD XP processors by jumping across two pins on the CPU socket.  Some enthusiasts would wrap the wire around pins on the processor why others would solder the connections on the back of the motherboards.  For me I found dropping a small wire in the socket worked just fine. 

With the wire trick you were able to fully unlock the CPU and were presented with adjustable multipliers along with Front Side Bus adjustments.  Provided you didn’t crack the processor installing the heatsink.

Back in the day I reviewed two of these motherboards and kept the best one in my hardware collection.  Sadly after Soltek shut down some 8+ years ago we lost one of the most creative motherboard makers in the industry. 

This could be argued but the Black PCBs you see on most motherboards today was started by Soltek.  Before that most companies were using Green, Brown and Red.  As it would turn out the “alternative” colors were rather toxic making them difficult to get past the environmental regulations.