Soyo's SY6VBA133

The Soyo's SY-6VBA-133

The motherboard market is beginning to heat up with a surge of new technology based on new chipsets from various vendors like Intel, AMD, SIS and VIA. Soyo has typically been one of the early entries into new technologies as they come to market. With the anticipation of the new i820 chipset based motherboards, VIA set out to fill the hole in that Intel was leaving in their product offering by pushing back the i820's original release date. The Soyo SY-6VBA-133 is a new motherboard designed around the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset. It supports many of the features of the forthcoming i820 boards only it is available now. These features include a DMA66 EIDE controller, PC133 compliance in the chipset itself, and AGP2X. The Apollo Pro133 "A" version of the chipset has AGP4X on board. This board is based on the plain revision not the "A". Here is the run down on the rest of the particulars.

PROCESSOR SUPPORT

• Intel Pentium III processor 450 - 733 MHz
• Intel Pentium® II processor (233-500 MHz)
• Intel Celeron Processor (266-466 MHz)
• 133, 100&66Mhz FSB(Front Side Bus)

FRONT SIDE BUS OPTIONS

• Available FSB options of: 66/ 75/ 81/ 83/ 90/ 95/ 100/ 105/ 110/ 112/ 113/ 115/ 117/ 118/ 120/ 122/ 124/ 126/ 133/ 135/ 137/ 138/ 140/ 142/ 144/ 150/ 155MHz

   

AUTO PCI CLOCK

• The PCI bus speed is automatically set between 30MHz and 41MHz regardless of FSB setting.
• ADJUSTABLE CPU CORE VOLTAGE
• CPU Core voltage may be increased in increments of 2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, and 10%.

CHIPSET

• VIA Apollo PRO133 two chip AGPset
• SYSTEM MEMORY
• 4 x 168 pin SDRAM DIMM sockets Support up to 1.5GB
• Supports PC133/PC100 Sdrams
• Provides ECC (Error Checking Correction) capability

EXPANSION SLOTS

• 5 x 32 bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (v2.1 compliant)
• 2 x 16 bit ISA slots (One PCI/ISA Shared slot)
• 1 x 32 bit AGP slot (v1.0 compliant)
• ON BOARD ULTRA I/O CHIP
• ITE 8671F-A chip
• 2 RS-232 Serial Ports (16550 UART compatible)
• 1 Parallel Printer Port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode)
• 1 FDD port (supports LS120, 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88 MB FDD)
• Provides IrDA port with optional cable for transceiver
• TWO ULTRA DMA66/33 IDE PORTS
• Supports two independent channels for 4 IDE devices
• Supports up to PIO mode 4 and Ultra DMA66/33
• 2 PCI bus mastering ATA E-IDE ports

Installation, Setup and Overclocking

Installation and setup with the SY-6VBA-133 was a pleasure. Win98SE recognized the new chipset with ease and setup its default drivers for the EIDE controller, PCI and AGP Bridges. We then installed the new VIA chipset drivers which Soyo supplies on a CDROM along with a few other goodies including their "Hardware Doctor" PC Health Monitoring utility. The new VIA drivers were updated versions of the AGP and EIDE drivers that are in WIN98SE. These should provide better performance.

Speaking of the software end of things, Soyo throw in a nice bundle of Symantec Utilities with the board including Virtual Drive (CD ROM Cloning on you hard drive), Ghost (HD copying software) and Anti-Virus. Nice touch Soyo. This is not a demo package either, these are full releases. I will say that the manual that comes with this board is a little spars. What information that is there is well written and illustrated but features of the board were left undocumented and we would have preferred more detail.

Overclocking with this new VIA based board was as easy to do as any BX based Soyo board. The BIOS has all the same features with a nice addition of controlling the clock of your SDRAM too! You can select SDRAM clocked to the FSB or the FSB minus the PCI clock (133-33=100 for example) or FSB plus the PCI clock (100+33=133 for example). We didn't play too much with this but it should provide nice flexibility with respect to the type of SDRAM you run. If you only have PC100 RAM and want to run a 133MHz. FSB, you can still achieve your goal. Just set the BIOS to 133 FSB and the DRAM option to FSB minus PCI clock. You'll then be running your RAM at 100MHz.and your processor at a 133MHz. clock times its multiplier. Another nice touch.

Finally, our P3-533B handled 620MHz. very easily with excellent stability on this board. We set the CPU down to 533 and 600 for the benchmarks. Oh yes, you were interested in benchmarks weren't you?

SY-6VBA-133 Testing and Benchmarks -->>