Soyo's SY6IZA


Soyo's SY6IZA - Page 1

 

Soyo's  SY-6IZA

Socket 370 Intel ZX Based Motherboard With AGP Support

 
Fourteen years old and 400 head strong, Soyo Computer offers for your consumption, the SY-6IZA. This board offers a fairly complete sets of features in an economical package.

What you are looking at is a VERY compact 4/1/1 set up. Here's the rest of the juice.
     

    Supports the following processors

  • 66/100MHz FSB Celeron 300A~433MHz

    Chipset

  • Intel 82440ZX two chip AGPset

    System Memory

  • Three 168-pin SDRAM DIMM sockets support up to 256MB

    Expansion Slots

  • Three 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (v2.1 compliant)
  • One PCI/ISA Shared Slot
  • One AGP Slot (v1.0 compliant)

    On Board 3D Audio Subsystem

  • Creative ES1373 PCI Plug & Play audio chip
  • 16 bit stereo full duplex with 48KHz sampling rate
  • High quality with 90dB SNR


    One Board Ultra I/O Chip (Winbond W83977EF)

  • Two RS-232 serial ports (16550 UART compatible)
  • One Parallel printer port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode)
  • One FDD port (Supports LS120, 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88MB FDD)
  • Provides IrDA port with optional cable for transceiver

    Two ULTRA DMA-33 IDE Ports

  • Supports 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 17 cm (12" x 6.7")
  • ATX form factor

    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
  • One Joystick Ports
  • Audio I/O : LINE-Outx1 , LINE-Inx1, MIC JACK x1

    Boot-Block Flash BIOS

  • Award PCI BIOS with green, ACPI, APM, plug and play, DMI functions,
  • Year 2000 compliant
  • Supports multiple-boot from E-IDE / SCSI /CD-ROM / FDD / LS120 / ZIP
  • 2 Mbit Flash ROM
     
Not a bad set up at all considering you get on board Creative EAX Supported Audio. Although you only get 1 ISA slot, the 4 PCI slots should give you ample room for expansion. 5 PCI would have been a little more spacious but this board's tiny form factor really is nice. Another thing to note is the board's excellent construction with nice heavy duty capacitors supporting the CPU slot. The folks at Soyo really know how to build in the quality. The ATX power connector is ALMOST in the right place. If Soyo only pushed it in a little more towards the CPU socket, I would have been a lot happier when trying to squeeze the ATX power connect down on its mate.
     

 Our Test System

Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Intel Celeron PPGA 300a, Soyo SY-6IZA Motherboard, 64 MB of PC100 RAM, Maxtor 17Gig EIDE UDMA Hard Drive, Skywell Magic TNT AGP Card w/ 16MB, On board Creative ES1373 Audio, Memorex 48X CDROM, Windows 98 w/ DX6.1, TNT Detonator Drivers

 


Overclocking

The SY-6IZA is a very competent overclocker. The board booted and ran stable at 504MHz. with our Celeron 300z chip. This is a chip that occasionally needs a little voltage boost to get stable on other boards. Not so with the Soyo board. If you are in need of the extra speed, this board is a sure thing. Now for the benchmarks...

     

Benchmarks

 

Winbench 99 Results - Desktop Resolution 1024X768X16 Bit color. Soyo
WinBench 99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 1470
WinBench 99/CPUmark32 912
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 1470
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 3630
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 26600
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 8650
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 6790
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 6470
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 5360
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 8770
WinBench 99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 6790
WinBench 99/FPU WinMark 2460
WinBench 99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) 6790
     
Well, these numbers are just a little light in the Disk WinMark department. However the CPUmark scores are strong and this board comes in VERY close behind our average Slot 1 board with a Pentium II at the same clock speed! Nothing like free MHz. I always say!
 

 

The Bottom Line


Pluses:
Grace under pressure. We pushed our Celeron 300a PPGA processor to the limit (504MHz) and she was stable. The ability to set a threshold CPU temp. and an alarm if you reach it, may be a toy for the hardened "overclocker" but for the uninitiated it can be um... a life saver. The built in audio by Creative is awesome. 3D positioning makes you want to turn the lights back on during your off hour Q2 forays.

Minuses:
Playing "hide-the-fan-connector" when you're trying to use that ultra-cool dual fan heat sink doesn't make your cooling efforts any easier. Power connector, close to the supply GOOD. Orientation of the connector resulting in the release tab jammed up against the power supply NOT GOOD. Picking yes but hey, you want attention to details, you got it!

Verdict:

A good, fast Socket 370 solution for short money. Overclockers are welcome!

 

The Soyo SY-6IZA gets a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter score of

80 ! This board is a neat little "Socket Rocket" !

 

-Bob "Kujo" Gagnon 

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