The first thing you will notice is the vast array of Front Side Bus frequencies you can choose from.  The overclocking capabilities of the SY-6BA+III were already very good, so Soyo didn't have to do much in this department.  Unfortunately, this board does not have FSB speeds in 1MHz increments like the new Abit BE6-II and BF6 do, but at least it has more useful bus speeds like 78 and 81 which most Celerons will use as their sweet spots. The Abit boards do not offer these FSB speeds.

The next most important feature to overclockers is voltage tweaking.  In the days of the Celeron 300A, a tweak from 2.0v to 2.1 or 2.2 could often mean the difference between a stable system and a frequently crashing system at 450 or 504MHz. Voltage increases of up to 10% are available on this board which means if you have a CPU that has a default core voltage of 2.0v, you can go up to a maximum of 2.2v.  Some people would have wanted a slightly higher threshold, but frankly, if your processor is not going to run at 2.2v, it's most likely not going to run at 2.3 or higher.  Add on to that the fact that past 10% voltage tweaking, you're risking damage to your CPU.

Another great feature Soyo implemented into this board is the Auto PCI clock.  What this does is set the FSB/PCI ratio to a level that will keep the PCI bus speed under 40MHz.  If you've ever tried overclocking your system to 83MHz or 133MHz you'll probably be familiar with component failures.  The hard drive or some other PCI device will often cause more problems then the CPU when running over spec. What the SY-6BA+III does is divide the FSB by 2, 3 or even 4 to get the PCI speed somewhere between 30 and 40MHz.  Running at a 133MHz FSB speed and 33MHz PCI speed is much better than running at 133 and 44.3MHz respectively.  Here is a summary of the FSB and PCI speeds:

Not only is the PCI clock automatically chosen for you, the AGP clock is also chosen for you automatically.  It is automatically set to 1/1 or 2/3 of your FSB speed so you don't have to worry about it (of course you can always override their choice).  Unfortunately, it's not as flexible as the PCI autoclock, so you may have some trouble getting your AGP video card running at over 72MHz.  TNT/TNT2's are widely known for failing when run over spec.  The new GeForce's however, run beautifully with 100+MHz AGP clockspeeds.

Finally, there is one more feature which aids in the overclocking field and that is the L2 cache tweaking of your CPU.  You can choose any setting between 0 and 15 which can sometimes help you increase stability in those situations where your CPU runs at a certain speed but will crash once or twice a day.  Other than that, it will not help you gain any significant ground but it definitely helps. 

The best thing about the above mentioned features is that they are all selected via a single screen in the BIOS setup, called Soyo Combo Setup.  This was an awesome design decision by the people at Soyo and really makes things a lot easier. You can set the CPU speed, FSB speed, voltage tweaking and L2 cache tweaking  while viewing the current PCI/AGP speed, hardware temperatures and fan RPMs all on the same screen!

The final feature of this board which makes it standout from the crowded BX board market is the the top notch hardware monitoring capabilities.  This board (like the SY-6BA+III) comes with a Winbond 83782D chip which does all of the monitoring.   The nice thing about this chip is that it can read the CPU's temperature straight from any of Intel's 0.25 micron processors including the Pentium II, III and Celerons for a more accurate reading than placing a thermistor on the CPU's surface.

The layout of this board is similar to that of most other slot-1 boards and is pretty much identical to the SY-6BA+III.  As you can tell, the ATX specification was followed quite closely. The ATX connector is placed behind the Slot-1 as usual but much closer to the right-edge of the board compared to the Abit BH6 in which the connector is close to the top-center of the board.  The IDE and floppy drive connectors are all placed in a good position which should reduce cable clutter to a minimum.

There are ten high quality capacitors placed right beside the Slot-1 to increase stability and many more scattered around the rest of the board. There are also three 3-pin fan connectors available.  Two are close to the Slot-1 to provide a dual fan cooling solution and one is placed at the bottom left corner to attach a chassis cooling fan if desired.