Board layout
The SL-PT880Pro's black and purple color scheme may conjure up disturbing images of Billy Zane in spandex, but it gives the board a unique aesthetic that shouldn't look too offensive through a case window.

Considering the board's bounty of integrated peripherals, the SL-PT880Pro's five PCI slots should be more than enough for most users. However, it would be nice to see wider spacing between the board's AGP and first PCI slot to give double-wide graphics cards a little extra room. Even with single-slot AGP cards, the first PCI slot usually must be left empty to ensure adequate air flow over the graphics card.

While I'm moving things around, I wouldn't mind having the SL-PT880Pro's power connectors closer to the edge of the board to cut down on cable clutter around the CPU socket. Both of the board's power connectors are close enough to the CPU socket for power cables to obstruct air flow around the processor heat sink.

Like just about every other Pentium 4 board on the market, the SL-PT880Pro use a standard retention bracket to secure a CPU heat sink to the board. Stock Intel coolers have plenty of room on the board, as do heat sinks that don't fan out from the retention bracket. However, several of the board's capacitors and its tall, passive north bridge cooler may interfere with larger and more exotic heat sink designs.

The SL-PT880Pro also has some potential clearance problems around its DIMM slot tabs, which can interfere with lengthy graphics cards like NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Longer graphics cards must be removed to gain full access to the board's DIMM slots, which is an annoying inconvenience, but not a big deal overall. AGP and DIMM slot clearance issues are quite common, but they're usually limited to boards with six PCI slots.

Soltek could avoid clearance issues by moving the SL-PT880Pro's DIMM slots over a couple of centimeters, which would give the tabs plenty of room to move even with longer graphics cards installed.

Although the SL-PT880Pro's DIMM slot placement isn't quite perfect, the board gets credit for featuring four DIMM slots that each support up to 1GB of DDR400 memory. As with all dual-channel designs, DIMMs should be installed in matched pairs for optimal performance. However, unlike dual-channel implementations with only two or three DIMM slots, the SL-PT880Pro's four-DIMM capacity simplifies memory upgrades by letting users run two pairs of DIMMs.

Soltek gives users plenty of storage upgrade capacity, as well. In addition to four Serial ATA ports, the board features three ATA/133 ports plus a single floppy port for Luddites.

Around the back, the SL-PT880Pro's port cluster has a little bit of everything. In addition to PS2, serial, and parallel ports, the port cluster features four USB ports, a Firewire port, and an Ethernet jack. The port cluster also contains three analog audio ports that share front, center, and rear output capabilities with line and mic inputs.

In addition to the USB and Firewire ports it provides in the rear port cluster, the SL-PT880Pro has on-board headers for another Firewire port and four more USB ports. Our board didn't come with PCI back plate headers to provide access to these ports, but Soltek neatly documents the pin patterns to make it easy to hook up third-party USB and Firewire connectors.