Throwback Time: Soltek SL-86SPE-L Violet Eyes

This year at CES 2017 I saw something I haven't seen in a long time.  A motherboard that wasn't completely black.  The board in question was the new Gigabyte Z270X Designare and instead of using the sudo standard matte black PCB it was built on a silver'ish board which got me thinking.

I used to have a metallic silver motherboard which as made by Soltek back in the Pentium 4 days.  Sadly that motherboard was lost in the void of broken hardware but, I was able to find another Socket 478 Springdale bit of awesome, the Soltek SL-86SPE-L "Violet Eyes" motherboard.

This motherboard is pretty special in that it came with SATA ports (direct from the South Bridge) along with an onboard RAID controller for us still running PATA drives.  At the top you'll find two memory banks for dual channel DDR memory along with a rather small VRM with capacitors that have since started to leak.

The one thing I really liked about Soltek motherboards is that they were different.  It would seem that every board they released featured a different PCB color and really helped them sell in the open computer markets of ASIA. Sadly, this was one of the last motherboards from Soltek, and any other board maker, to feature a PCB color other than black. As it would turn out the process to create these motherboards was extremely toxic and couldn't pass the new environmental laws.

From this board forward the Soltek motherboards all featured a glossy black PCB and purple expansion sockets that were first introducted on the Violet Eyes. 

If anyone is curious and can stand the old school check out my review of the Soltek SL-86SPE-L which is still hosted at Ninjalane, it is only 13 years old .