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By Tikkler (tikkler@onepc.net) - November 18, 2000

Infobox

Product Reviewed: SY-K7VTA Product Page Manufacturer: SOYO Computer Inc. Home Page Suggested Retail Price: Unspecified

Just a week after I originally conducted my first review of the SOYO SY-K7VTA socket A motherboard, I was informed by SOYO that they were now taking that motherboard into full production. A few days after that, a production version of the SY-K7VTA was waiting for me at my front door and so, here's the update review on the SY-K7VTA. If you haven't already read my original review of the SY-K7VTA, please do so as I will continually refer to it throughout this entire review. If you have already read my benchmark-less original review, you'll be happy to find some benchmarks comparing the pre-production and production versions of the SY-K7VTA in this update review.

The Voice-less Doctor
In my original review of the SY-K7VTA, I forgot to include anything regarding SOYO's Voice Doctor feature, which was already implemented into that pre-production board that I received. The Voice Doctor is basically a feature built-into the SY-K7VTA motherboard that will notify you about what is wrong if your computer fails to boot up. Sure, this diagnostic feature has been around since the beginning of the Pentium, or maybe even the 486, but SOYO's Voice Doctor will literally tell you, in either English or Chinese through a jumper on the motherboard, what's wrong through your PC speaker.

We tested this feature out on both the pre-production and production versions of the SY-K7VTA by simply removing all memory modules from the motherboard, and, sure enough, a female voice, although a little bit quiet, informed us that "the memory module might be damaged or not installed." Nice.

First Impressions
Most of the packaging has remained the same when compared to the pre-production package. Included is the same SOYO 3-in-1 Bonus pack that I praised so much in my original review, the same quick-start guide, the IDE and floppy cables and the driver CD. Still missing is the optional USB connector to plug into the motherboard to utilize the 2 extra USB ports supported by the VIA KT133 chipset for a total of 4 ports but what's rather strange is that SOYO included a pack of thermal grease this time round for applying onto the CPU.

SOYO had made some minor modifications to their SY-K7VTA-move the AC97 CODEC chip here, take away and add some capacitors here and there for more efficient stability, etc. The main change, however, has to be the addition of the multiplier dipswitch. Below are pictures of both the pre-production (right) and production (left) SY-K7VTA, and the red boxes point out the additions that have made to make this multiplier dipswitch possible.

Here's how it works: if you wish to easily overclock your processor by changing the multiplier, there are 2 parts that you must take care of, unlocking the processor by joining the L1 bridges found on the ceramic of it and actually adjusting the multiplier-the SY-K7VTA now can take care of that latter part.

There are 3 jumpers on the SY-K7VTA that, when pulled out of their default positions, will allow you to use the dipswitches on the motherboard. These dipswitches are documented in the manual (although it would have been great if SOYO had also printed some reference information regarding the settings on the motherboard itself) and allow for multiplier settings from 5.0 to 12.5 in 0.5 increments. Using my unlocked 650MHz processor, I tested this dipswitch out and, sure enough, it worked like a charm!

Unfortunately, there are some changes that I'm not too much of a fan of, such as their decision to remove the LED to signify if there's power supplied to the board or not. For users such as myself who never actually plug a motherboard into a case, that LED helped greatly in helping me determine the status of the computer and the powersupply.

It's also sad to say that the south bridge used on the production version of the SY-K7VTA is still the older VT82C686A and not the newer VT82C686B. Fortunately, there's not much difference between the 2 south bridges except for the fact that the VT82C686B has support for ATA-100, which is now being considered as "standard," while the VT82C686A that's found on the SY-K7VTA only has support for ATA-66. This isn't too big of a problem nowadays where very few hard drives can even take advantage of the ATA-66 interface, but the lack of ATA-100 support could pull this board back in the future.

Powering Up...
After setting everything up, I turned on the computer and was greeted with the same, informative screen that I loved so much with the pre-production SY-K7VTA. On this screen, the same information was shown, such as the processor speed, the bus speed, the multiplier setting, the processor and motherboard temperatures and the voltage that's applied to the processor.

The BIOS now has a revision of "2AA1" while the pre-production unit had a revision code of "2AP2." Inside the BIOS, everything remained the same as it was with the pre-production version. The SOYO Combo menu item was still there and inside, you could still choose the most useful and common settings from an all-in-one location. Settings such as the FSB clock (the SY-K7VTA now adds two settings, 90MHz and 95MHz to its original pile of 100MHz-120MHz in 1MHz increments settings) and the voltage (above 0.25v or below 0.1v of the processor default setting in 0.025 increments) can be found in this SOYO Combo menu item.

There's also a little difference in how the two versions of the SY-K7VTA detected the amount of voltage that the processor needed. The pre-production version detected that my Duron 650MHz required 1.60v, but the production version set it to 1.55v by default, 0.05v lower than the specifications for the Duron call for. Fortunately, the reduce of 0.05v didn't reduce system stability at all and should, theoretically, cool down the processor slightly.

Since the processor that I had in this test system is a low-mid-level processor, the AMD Duron 650MHz, I felt that using the PowerColor PowerGene GeForce2 MX was sufficient enough for these tests. Regardless of which, because all tests were run at 640x480, using the MX's big brother, the GTS, would not have affected the scores much, if not, at all.

Benchmark Results
I would like to mention, once again, that I ran all benchmarks at a low resolution of 640x480 to avoid running into fill-rate bottlenecks on the GeForce2 MX card that was running the graphics subsystem during our tests.

A quick glance through the chart shows the entire story; SOYO has tweaked a whole lot out of their SY-K7VTA since the last time we had a chance to take a look a look at it. The production version managed 200 more 3DMarks, almost 4 more FPS and, what was the most improved, managed 77 more MB/s in SiSoft Sandra's FPU memory bandwidth test than the pre-production version we reviewed earlier. A look at those improvements clearly states how much more juice out of their design.

For the most part, SOYO has changed very few things on their SY-K7VTA. The pre-production version that we received earlier looks almost identical to the new production version that we received just recently and are featuring in this review. Most of the changes come in the form of moving some very minor chips around, moving and removing some capacitors and adding my favourite feature: the dipswitches to adjust your processor multiplier settings. Overal, SOYO has an excellent product in the SY-K7VTA and the addition of the multiplier dipswitches put this product way up in the ranks of ASUS and ABIT KT133 counterparts.

This review is an update review of a previously-reviewed product and such, there will not be a formal Pros breakdown. There will, however, be a Changes to Product breakdown, a Cons breakdown (which addresses both original cons left un-attended and new cons that have arsisen after the product update) and an updated Overall Rating that takes into consideration all things mentioned in this update.

Worthy Changes Addition of processor multiplier dipswitch Slight shift of board layout (capacitors, minor microchips, etc.) Addition of thermal paste Performance greatly increased Cons 2 x CPUFAN connectors still remain Extra USB connector still not included SOYO should consider putting out a version of the SY-K7VTA with VIA's newer VT82C686B south bridge for ATA-100 support

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