Soyo SY-6BA+IV Review

Written: 10/29/99
Written by: Moto Racer®
Soyo SY-6BA+IV Supplied by: AMK Services

Introduction

The Soyo SY-6BA+IV is an ATX motherboard with a name that's way too long. This is Soyo's answer to the Abit BE6-II. Soyo basically took their SY-6BA+III and added ATA/66 support plus a few more features. You might wonder with the coming of the Camino chipset why Soyo would chose to do an ATA/66 motherboard based on the BX chipset?    Well, Camino is still suffering from production problems and RAMBUS is damn expensive and according to tests done by Apex it has questionable performance benefits. By itself, the BX chipset does not support ATA/66. Both Soyo and Abit use a controller chip made by Highpoint.

The Soyo SY-6BA+IV is PC-99 spec motherboard. All that really means is that its input/output connectors are color coded to match  PC-99 specs input/output devices. Hmmm, the last mouse I got didn't have a green plug.  It does look cool however and I guess there are people out there who gets the mouse and keyboard connectors backward sometimes.

The SY-6BA+IV uses the now standard 5 PCI, 2 ISA and 1 AGP port. The board layout  is very nice. The IDE and ATA/66 connectors are placed fairly high up, which should make connecting hard drives that are placed high in the case a bit easier.

With its jumperless design and ability to adjust core voltage, the SY-6BA+IV was created as an overclocker's motherboard. The board supports a very nice range of bus speeds to get the most out of your CPU. You can chose from the the following FSB: 66, 75, 78, 81, 83, 90, 95, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 124, 126, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 150, and 155Mhz. Voltage can be adjusted from 2 to 2.2V, which should be fine. I really don't like running a CPU higher than 2.2V.

Next Page: The specs

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