For most people Soyo Computer Inc. needs no
introduction; they've been making innovative and excellent quality
motherboards since 1985. For others Soyo may be a little
unfamiliar, because after all, their biggest market is the Asian
market since they are based in Taiwan. Over the years Soyo has
been building a bigger name for itself in the North American market
and with their latest motherboard, they are surely going to make a big
splash, especially amongst overclockers.
This motherboard, as you may have
already guessed is the Soyo SY-6BA+III motherboard. This is
Soyo's successor to the popular SY-6BA which was also based on the
i440BX AGPset. So as you can imagine, with a second generation board
combined with Soyo's excellent motherboard design skills and the
proven performance and reliability of the i440BX AGPset, you've got
a potential masterpiece.
Let's begin by taking a look at this
board's
impressive feature set:
|
Motherboard
Features |
| Processor Support
(CPU) |
| - |
100MHz
FSB Pentium III Processors 450/500/550/600 MHz |
| - |
100MHz
FSB Pentium II 350/400/450 MHz |
| - |
66MHz
FSB Pentium II 233/266/300/333 MHz |
| - |
66MHz
FSB Celeron Processors 266~300MHz |
| - |
66MHz
FSB Celeron Processors 300A~466 MHz with integrated
128KB full speed L2 cache |
|
| Chipset |
| - |
Intel 440BX Chipset |
| - |
66/100MHz CPU FSB |
|
| DRAM Modules |
| - |
Four 168-pin SDRAM DIMM
sockets support up to 1GB |
| - |
PC100 DIMM support |
| - |
Provides ECC (Error
Checking Correction) capability |
|
| I/O
Chip |
| - |
ITE 8671F-A chip |
| - |
Two RS-232 serial ports
(16550 UART compatible) |
| - |
One parallel printer
port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode) |
| - |
One FDD port (Supports
LS120, 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88 MB FDD |
| - |
Provides IrDA port with
optional cable for transceiver |
|
| Expansion Slots |
| - |
Five 32-bit Bus
Mastering PCI slots (V2.1 compliant) |
| - |
Two 16-bit ISA slots
(one shared ISA/PCI slot) |
| - |
One AGP slot (v1.0
compliant) |
|
| Boot
Block Flash BIOS |
| - |
Award PCI BIOS with
green, ACPI, APM, PnP, DMI, functions and Year 2000
compliant |
| - |
Supports
multiple-boot from E-IDE/SCSI/CD-ROM/FDD LS120/ZIP
|
| - |
2 Mbit Flash ROM |
|
| Two Ultra DMA 33 IDE
Ports |
| - |
Two independent channels
for four IDE devices |
| - |
Supports up to PIO mode
4 and Ultra DMA 33 |
| - |
Two PCI bus mastering
ATA E-IDE ports |
|
| Board
Dimensions |
| - |
Four layers, 30.5 cm x
19 cm (12” x
7.5”) |
| - |
ATX form factor |
|
| Enhanced PC Health
Monitoring |
| - |
On-board voltage
monitors for CPU Vcore, VTT,
+5v, +12V, 3.3V, 5VSB and battery low |
| - |
CPU fan four speed
control and monitor |
| - |
FAN speed monitor |
| - |
Precision CPU
temperature monitoring through CPU on-die thermal diode |
|
| Double
stack Back-Panel I/O Connectors |
| - |
PS/2 Mini-DIN mouse
& keyboard ports |
| - |
Two USB ports |
| - |
Two D-Sub 9-pin male
serial ports |
| - |
One D-Sub 25-pin female
printer port |
|
| Other
functions |
| - |
FCC Class B and
CE EMI Regulation Compliant |
| - |
PC98 ACPI
Compliant |
|
Taking a look at the above specs, this board
looks like a regular Slot-1 BX motherboard, perhaps with the
exception that it is one of the few boards that has both 5 PCI slots
and 4 DIMM slots. It is also one of the only boards which has an
extensive set of hardware monitoring features. While this
already looks like a great board, the beauty of it doesn't start to
show until you take a closer look...
