Soyo's SY7VMA PM133 Socket 370 Motherboard

By, Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta
12/7/00

ZD Winbech taxes the system with portions of mainstream applications.  Let's see how the SY-7VMA handles some real-world tests.

ZD Winbench Performance Tests Here's what to expect.

ZD Winbench

The Winbench scores with the SY-7VMA are great.  "Office" applications are perfectly at home when running on this board.  

We also ran Quake 3's built in timedemo, Demo001 at a low resolution.  With a fast video card installed, at low resolutions your framerate is limited to the speed of your CPU because the fillrate of the video card is never reached.

Quake3

For the sake of comparison we also ran this timedemo using the PM133's integrated S3 Savage video.  The integrated video is fine for office computing but we do not recommend it for gaming.

Overall, we were very impressed with the Soyo SY-7VMA.  This motherboard should have a very broad appeal.  Power users should like the performance of the board and budget shoppers will like the relatively low price tag (around $110).  The only potential buyers that may be disappointed are the hardcore overclockers looking for FSBs in 1MHz. increments.  We really liked the SY-7VMA and give it a HotHardware heat meter rating of...

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