If you've read our review
of Soyo's excellent SY-6BA+III motherboard, you definitely know who
Soyo is. For those of you who haven't read the review or even heard
of Soyo, they are a Taiwanese company who has been making innovative and excellent quality
motherboards since 1985 and now have a great reputation for top notch
boards that even match or surpass the overclocking capabilities
of the latest Abit boards.
As you may have noticed,
we have reviewed the SY-6BA+III and gave it an excellent rating
because it was, and still is one of the best BX motherboards you can
get.
With newer chips like the i810e, i820 and the VIA Apollo Pro 133A, you
would have thought that the BX chipset is dead. However, this is
not the case, the BX chipset still provides equal, if not greater
performance than the aforementioned chipsets in almost all tests,
other than memory bandwidth. So, what I'm saying, is the BX
chipset will still provide you with a strong performing platform well
into the new year and best of all, the BX chipset is stable as a rock,
which cannot yet be said about the new chipsets.
Today, we're taking a look
at Soyo's latest BX incarnation, the SY-6BA+IV. We thought it
couldn't get any better than the SY-6BA+III, but Soyo has proven us
wrong by adding a few more goodies to make this board
unbeatable. 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~500 MHz with integrated
128KB full speed L2 cache
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
Ultra DMA 33 &
66 IDE Ports
-
Two independent channels
for four IDE devices
-
Supports up to PIO mode
4 and Ultra DMA 33
-
Two ATA-66 Channels for
four IDE devices provided by HPT366 UltraDMA/66
controller chip
-
Four 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
-
SOYO AI-BIOS : Four-Way
Active Intercepted CIH virus Design
Looks very similar to the
SY-6BA+III, doesn't it? It has the same 5 PCI slots, and 2 ISA
Slots (1 more than most other 5 PCI slot boards). It has
fantastic thermal monitoring/Fan RPM monitoring circuitry, 4 DIMM
slots for a maximum of 1GB of RAM and all the other regular stuff you
find on a good BX motherboard. Why change stuff that
already works perfectly?
However, as you may have
noticed, Soyo has included an UltraDMA/66 controller to this board,
the High Point Technologies HPT366 chip. This is the same controller used in Abit's BP6,
BE6 and BE6-II motherboards. Other than that, the board also has a new
feature which Soyo calls AI-BIOS which actively protects the BIOS from
being infected by the infamous CIH virus. Finally,
the
most evident change from the SY-6BA+III is the bright colored back
connectors which are part of the PC-98 specification and are found on
all new boards.
