The SL-75DRV5 is the latest in the Soltek DRV series of popular and fast motherboards. Based on the VIA KT333 chipset, it utilises the new DDR333 technology and supports ATA/133 hard drives. It's built on Soltek's "Purple Ray" PCB.

This board is not as feature rich as some in this group test, but not everyone wants the expense of RAID, Bluetooth and other relatively new features. Layout wise, the board is well thought out and well designed. There's plenty of room around the CPU for larger coolers and the DIMM slots are well placed and don't interfere with the 4X AGP slot.

For those who want extra fans there are three extra 3-pin connectors on the board. However, for some strange reason a long power cable has been used for the Northbridge fan; so long in fact that it untidily winds around capacitors to get it out of the way.

If you want to tweak the SL-75DRV5, then you'll have to manually alter the Dip switches for the clock multipliers, AGP and DIMM voltages, since there's nothing in the BIOS to help you.

Soltek provides several utilities with the SL-75DRV5. These include PC-Cillin 2000, Virtual Drive 6, Partition Magic 6.0 SE and Drive Image 4. There's also an excellent motherboard manual and - full marks to Soltek for this - a separate manual for all the bundled software applications.

The SL-75DRV5 has great performance and offers good value for money. If you don't want the added cost of IDE RAID and USB 2.0 then it's well worth a look.