ATA/66 Onboard

ATA/66 support on a motherboard is something that I have been wanting since the beginning of the year. Intel's upcoming Camino chipset will support that, but you are going to need to wait until the winter for it's release. Your only other option was the addition of a Promise or another PCI card adding support for ATA/66.

Soyo added ATA/66 support to their motherboards, thanks to the HPT-366 Ultra DME Controller chip from HighPoint Technologies. This chip brings ATA/66 support to the motherboard without having to wait for Intel's Camino chipset or having to use a PCI adapter.

ATA/33 support is also on the board, bringing support for up to 8 IDE devices on your system at once (assuming you have that many IRQs to spare). Now you can have a multitude of IDE devices with 4 or 5 hard drives, DVD Drive, CD-ROM and backup. Just make sure you get a bigger case with a large power supply, because you are going to need it.

ATA-66 and UDMA66 sound fast, however you are not going to get a 100% increase like the letter suggests. Instead you are given burst support of 66MHz, provided the hard drive can send that level of data bandwidth to the chip. Under testing with the 18 Gig Quantum KA hard drive, I was seeing only about 15% increase performance on the average.

Conclusion

The Soyo SY-6BA-IV offers pretty much everything the overclocker needs. It has enough front side bus adjustments to get the most out of most P2, P3 or Celeron CPU. The only thing it really lacks is a thermal probe.

The motherboard is compact enough to fit into any ATX case. However, remember that a big cooler like the Global Win FPD32 will be blocking off some of those DIMM slots.

I found the placement of the fan headers to be less than ideal if you are running a big cooler. My P3 with the Alpha P125 cooler completely blocked off one of the fan headers, rendering it totally useless. That only leaves two fan headers available, which are taken up by the two fans in the alpha cooler, and leaves no place for the video card fan.

Given the choice between the Soyo Soyo SY-6BA-IV and the Abit BE6-II, I would have to give the nod to Abit mainly because the BE6-II allows you to adjust the front side bus from 83 to 200 Mhz in 1 Mhz increments. Performance wise, the Soyo is just as stable as the Abit.

Overall, a great motherboard.

The Goods

• Very stable
• Lots of FSB speeds to chose from
• ATA/66 support built in
• Good layout
• Good software bundle

The Bads

• Big coolers will be block off DIMM slots

Rating: 9/10

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