Soyo's SY6VBA133

The Soyo's SY-6VBA-133

As we noted earlier, we had the SY-6VBA-133 fired up in no time so we proceeded to crank up the benchamarks!

SiSoft's Sandra 99 - Soyo SY-6VBA-133 - 600MHz.

SiSoft's Sandra 99 - Soyo SY-6BA+IV - 600MHz.

Just for comparison, we threw in a Sandra benchmark of the latest Soyo BX board with the exact same set up. As you can see, the VIA chipset lags slightly in overall compute performance (MIPS). The FPU numbers are very close. Regardless, this type of difference in either spec is probably imperceptible to a user in "real world" applications.

Here are the default speed Sandra numbers at 133MHz. FSB.

SiSoft's Sandra 99 - Soyo SY-6VBA-133 - 533MHz.

We set up the Soyo SY-6BA+IV again for comparison. Again, as far as the CPU numbers go, things are pretty much neck and neck. Where the VIA Apollo PRO133 chipset lags a little, is disk performance. We think this may be due to the fact that the VIA EIDE Bus Master Drivers are still a little young. Perhaps the gap will close a little as time moves on and VIA releases new revisions.

OK then, we know what you folks are thinking. That was good coverage on the CPU and Disk Performance side of things but what about AGP 4X?! Recently we learned from one of our astute readers that the VIA Apollo PRO133 chipset does not in fact support AGP4X. Only the Apollo Pro133A rev. of the chipset supports this. It looks as if the SY-6VBA-133 that we tested was designed with the first rev of the chip not the "A" rev. As a result, the board we tested supposedly is not capable of AGP4X. We'll confirm this with Soyo and post another update.

There IS a setting in the BIOS that says "2X AGP Enable". You can enable or disable it. However, the manual doesn't tell you anything about this BIOS option. We asked Soyo for a response to our question on this as well. We hope to hear back from them shortly. We will also post an update on this as soon as we get further information. Our assumption is that this switch enables AGP 2X or disables it down to 1X mode. What we have for you now is a Quake3 Arena Demo benchmark with the "2X AGP" settings disabled and enabled.

These results are for one resolution, 1024X768 at 32bit color and textures. We also set the texture size bar to the default high quality setting and then to the max setting. We used Quake3 version 1.08 for our tests. Also, remember to check our system specs just to refresh yourself on the other components

We'll kick ourselves if Soyo tells us that the 2X AGP setting is something different. :-) However, as you can see, the 2X AGP setting does seem to give a slight boost in performance. That boost is lessened at the higher resolution texture setting. What can we conclude with respect to AGP 4X in this case? As we noted before, unfortunately not much. We'll just have to wait and see if the VIA PRO133A gives a "real-world" boost with its AGP4X.

Wrap-up

The SY-VBA-133 is indicative of standard Soyo product. It is a quality piece of workmanship with excellent stability and a good well rounded set of features. The VIA chipset it is based on is a competitive system solution that does have room for improvement with its maturity. Additionally, the "SDRAM Plus or Minus PCI Clock" setting in the BIOS should give added flexibility for those looking to run 133MHz. FSB CPUs with PC100 memory. Thus, consumers will not be forced to shell out the extra money on new PC133 memory if they are looking to save a few dollars. We would have liked more detailed documentation with this board. However, all told, this is solid new technology from Soyo which should serve you well for aggressive overclocking and the like. For many folks, the AGP and Memory bus manipulation features of this board may be the only way to achieve certain higher end fringes of overclocking.

We give the Soyo SY-6VBA-133 a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter rating of....

85 - Hot VIA Apollo Pro133 Injected!

-Davo