In the nice looking box, you'll find the following items:

• The SY-6BA+IV Motherboard
• Quick Start Manual
• Floppy drive Cable and 1 80-conductor UltraDMA/66 cable
• Soyo Driver/Manual CD
• Soyo 3-in-1 Bonus Pack

The package comes with everything you need to get up in running in no time.  It comes with a very good quick start manual that has all the information you would need to install the motherboard as well as specs and and tips, etc.  The driver CD has a nice autorun interface which allows you to read the fully detailed manual, install bus mastering drivers and check for the latest BIOS updates.  The package also comes with the Soyo 3-in-1 Bonus Pack which is very nice bonus indeed, the best I've seen bundled with a motherboard thus far.  It is actually Norton Antivirus 5.0, Norton Ghost 5.0 and Norton Virtual Drive all bundled together on one CD; all are full versions by the way.  Head over to Norton's site in case you're wondering what any of these utilities are for.

Installing this board was straightforward and pretty much by the book.  After plugging in a couple 64MB CAS 2 PC100 SDRAM modules and a Celeron 400, I screwed it into the backplate of my Medium Tower AOpen HX-45 ATX case.  I then hooked up the ATX power cable as well as the small block on the board containing the power switch, reset switch, PC speaker and LED connectors.  Next in was a full array of 5 PCI cards, an AGP TNT2 and 1 ISA cards to see how this board could handle this configuration.  Last but not least, I plugged in a floppy drive, 1 Quantum KA Plus 13.6 GB 7200 RPM ATA-66 drive and 1 ATA-33 hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive and an Internal Zip drive.  Absolutely no jumpers to set to all.

A nice extra that Soyo threw in, was cables that have retention clips on the ends of them.  I would bet that many of you have turned on your PC one day (especially after transporting) to find the message "floppy drive failure" or "primary hdd failure" only to find that the cable had somehow come loose.  These orange retention clips ensure that the connectors stay in place.

The total building process took approximately 25 minutes. The POST screen appeared and the processor was properly detected as a Celeron at 400MHz.  The first thing I usually do after building a system is to go into the BIOS setup and make all the necessary adjustments to make the system as fast as possible.  We explore overclocking in the Celeron 400 in the next section.

As with all the other motherboards we test, we've been using this one for about a month straight, to see if any apparent stability or incompatibility problems arise.  Like the SY-6BA+III, I'm happy to report that the board has been performing flawlessly and stability is top notch especially when overclocked.  The HPT366 controller has also been behaving excellently, early reports using the first revision of drivers stated that a BSOD would often occur in Windows, but with the new 1.20 drivers, I haven't had a single one!

I decided to be brave and push my Celeron 400 to its limit.  I slapped on Global WIN's awesome FDP32 cooler (btw, it fits nicely but blocks 2 out of 4 memory slots). On the Soyo Combo Setup screen in the BIOS, I set the processor speed to 600MHz (6.0x100MHz) and made all of the other required adjustments.  The system posted and even booted into to Windows without any problems, after a while it locked up.  I upped the voltage to 2.2 volts and then things ran very well.  I could even play Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 without any problems.  Strangely enough, I could not unzip large files. Anything compressed file over 5MB would give me a CRC error when running at 600MHz, but at 400 it worked fine.  This was the only problem at that speed, I guess my Celeron 400 has some issues at that high of a speed.  If anyone knows why it can't unzip a large file but can play through hours of UT, please email me.

Stability was not an issue at all with this board, no matter what FSB speed we were using. 150+MHz FSB's are this boards forte, so if you have RAM and a processor that can make it that high, this is the board to do it with. Performance was also within 3% of all other i440BX Boards we've tested.  Winbench 99 results can be found on the next page.

Next Page: Performance, Ratings and Conclusion

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The Hardware Pros are not responsible from any damage resulting from overclocking.