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.

On to: Test Setup