Soyo
6BA+100 motherboard review
Posted
by Adam
Klein on September 01, 2000 - Page 3/5
Company:
Soyo Product: 6BA
+100 motherboard
More impressions
The
board itself is laid out a lot like some of the other recent
BX motherboards. The spacing leaves a lot to be desired. If
you own one of the older revisions of BX boards, you'll notice
there is a lot of spacing between the CPU, chipset and DIMM
slots.
The
newer BX boards have a much tighter design, putting these
components closer together. This can be a hindrance for the
overclockers that knows the performance benefits of the BX and
wants to use the absolute best cooler no matter the size. The
board has four DIMM slots for a total memory capacity of up to
1GB. The BX design specification must also incorporate the
standard 33MB per second IDE connectors. This is why you will
always see four IDE connectors on a BX board that also
incorporates another drive controller.
What's
also interesting is that there is very few of the large
capacitors like I have seen on some other motherboards. The
6BA+100 has a row of eight 1000uF 6.3V capacitors to ensure
signal integrity.
The
BIOS is very feature rich. The 6BA+100 has easy to use front
side bus speed selections along with core voltage adjustments
within the BIOS, making it very easy for the new overclockers
and the experienced overclockers alike. Soyo refers to this as
the Soyo Combo Setup. The BX may not officially support a
133MHz operation, but the feature is listed on Soyo's page as
a supported feature.
Oddly
enough, the only thing they point out for a 133MHz operation
is to use 133MHz SDRAM. It does not mention the out of spec
AGP bus speed. The good thing about the Soyo 6BA+100 is it's
ability to run at 133MHz with total stability when a video
card capable of 89MHz AGP bus speed is being used. The Soyo
Combo Setup automatically sets the AGP ratio and PCI ratios
depending on what bus speed is set. A lot of motherboards
already set the bus speeds depending on what front side bus
speed is used, so this is nothing new, yet it is still listed
as one of the major features of the 6BA+100.
Overclocking
Overclocking
when using the board was very easily done thanks to the
Softset features. Armed with a Slot 1 Pentium III 650 with the
cB0 stepping, I was ready to see just what the 6BA+100 had to
offer. At the default speed of 650MHz, the board ran
flawlessly, just as it should. With a 133MHz bus speed
yielding a total clock speed of 866MHz, the system was still
stable.
This
board was also able to complete 3DMark 99, 3DMark 2000, Unreal
Tournament and Quake III torture testing to ensure a stable
89MHz AGP bus speed with a GeForce 2 GTS board installed.
After I was sure that 133MHz was working, I started to
overclock to the limit of the CPU and of what the motherboard
provided. In the end, a total clock speed of 936MHz with a bus
speed of 144MHz was the limit to this combo. What's
interesting is that I was actually able to boot into Windows
with a bus speed of 155MHz at 1008MHz.
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