Board Specs
Board Layout: The motherboard has a very efficient layout on the PCB. I think it is very smart of Soyo to place the dreaded AMR in between the PCI slots so that it does not waste as much valuable space. Also I found it interesting that the floppy connector is located in the same row as the AMR. This moves the connector to the bottom area of the board and allows the cable to be tucked up underneath the PCB and run up to the floppy drive. The 1/5/1/1 layout of the board is designed for maximum expansion. The availability of an ISA slot will allow the use of the old hardware based modem that you thought you might have to throw away. The board comes with onboard sound, which is becoming a standard in the industry but it can be disabled. A standard green heatsink cools the chipset and there are also two additional USB headers if you need to put connectors on the front of your case. Also included are two ATA/66 - ATA/33 compatible EIDE connectors located in the preferred area at the front upper area of the board. A Wake On Lan connector is also provided.The FSB adjustments: One big benefit of this main board, like many other offerings from SOYO, is the vast number of FSB adjustments, 32 speeds between the ranges of 66 to 166; specifically, 66, 68, 75, 80, 83, 85, 90, 95, 100, 103, 105, 109, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 124, 126, 129, 133, 135, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 154, 160, 166. This wide range of adjustment allows us to get every bit of juice out of our beloved Intel chips, as they will possibly stand. The biggest advantage of this range in FSB is unlike many other boards, the range of adjustments in the below 100Mhz range. These adjustments are becoming less necessary in the days of the Celeron 2 processors but if you ended up with a Celeron 2 that would not make the 100Mhz cut then you will no longer be stuck with 83Mhz. The likelihood of that happening? It is all the luck of the batch but most seem to be just fine above 100Mhz.
Voltage, give it the juice: Voltage adjustments on the SY-7VCA are like all other Soyo boards I have ever used and are simply a percentage increase, 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9, and 10%. That is not all bad because it will keep the insane tweaker from going way to far with the voltage and having thermo-nuclear meltdown occur on their processor; but it does limit the possibilities when trying to edge out that final speed jump or the processor needs just a little more v-core for total stability. This feature is adequate but does not jump out and say ULTIMATE OVERCLOCK like many of the other outstanding areas of this main board.
Simple AGP: The AGP bus speed dividers are the dreaded downfall of the Intel BX chipset and the SY-7VCA has fixed this problem with automatic AGP bus speed generation. What this means to us is no more jumpers or BIOS settings to worry about when setting up our systems. The clock generator for AGP sets the bus to the proper divider when the FSB is in the ranges of 66 - 99 = 1:1, 100 - 132 = 2:3, 133 - 160 = 1:2, thus no more worries concerning AGP bus speed.
Memory tweakage: As most of you know the memory performance of the VIA chipset has been less then desirable. Converting some of us Die Hard BX fans into the better AGP bus speeds at the sacrifice of memory performance performance has been unsuccessful. Soyo has made drastic improvements in their newest BIOS releases for this board and flashing to the newest version should be one of the first steps performed in setting up this main board. The memory performance is getting closer to that of the BX chipset and the poor memory performance is diminishing. Memory tweaks are plentiful in the BIOS, yes you can just select Auto but the ability to customize and tweak is also available, there is also a Turbo setting and that is what I would recommend. Soyo has given the ability to adjust the memory bus separate of the FSB so if you only have PC100 memory you will not have to rush out and get the latest and fastest PC133. Also you can overclock the memory bus separate of the FSB. For instance if you have a Celeron 2 and PC133 memory you can still take advantage of the faster memory by adding 33Mhz to the memory bus. In this instance the memory performance could possibly outperform the BX boards.
Hard Drive performance: The SY-7VCA gives UDMA-66 support onboard so there is no need to add an IDE controller card unless 4 devices are not sufficient. The hard disk performance on this system was spectacular. It was setup with the latest 4in1 drivers with UDMA enabled in turbo mode. The disk was a 27.3Gb IBM 34GXP Deskstar and ran Win98.
