SOYO 6BA+III Review

Introduction

For a longtime Soyo was just your run of the mill motherboard manufacturer with nothing special in the motherboard arena. In time, the deep pocketed overclocker has heated up the market and ASUS ruled as Kings of the Game, with an almost unlimited set of jumper configurations and overclocking possibilities. However, these kind of features were not even mentioned by the motherboard manufacturers, like some kind of dark features, as overclocking was not widespread enough to make an announcement on that matter. Well folks, by that time ABIT began to show their muscle with new motherboards that would overclock openly with different BUS speeds, like the ASUS P2B motherboard. But this time SoftMenu, a feature the original ASUS boards lacked, was a cool feature that let you change the FSB speed instantly within BIOS and without touching one jumper cable. That was not all, ABIT also provided the user the ability to change the core voltage of the processor, an ability that was unique to ABIT since the new 6BA+ III arrived. Soyo tried to compete with ABIT with their model 6BA+ motherboard, but with little success. Well the 6BA+ has few FSB speeds and some cool tweaks in its BIOS but still the ABIT motherboards like the BX6 had no true competitor in the market. It was the truly overclocking king with its huge FSB speeds and core voltage tweaks, while ASUS P2B became a thing of the past with its messy jumper settings. Of course, Soyo, still convinced that it can win the battle, took this overclocking consideration seriously, and showed us their new baby, the 6BA+ III. And for the first time, ABIT had to contend with a real competitor in the overclocking arena.Well I will try to show you the facts so you can see for yourself, and then in the end, we will see if this motherboard is really the new overclocking King in the market.

Technical specs:

Processors:

Intel Pentium III processor 450/550 MHz

Intel PentiumŪ II processor 233-450 MHz

Intel Celeron Processor 266-466 MHz

Chipset:

Intel 440BX Chipset.

Front Side BUS Speed Options: 66/ 75/ 81/ 83/ 90/ 95/ 100/ 105/ 110/ 112/ 113/ 115/ 117/ 118/ 120/ 122/ 124/ 126/ 133/ 135/ 137/ 138/ 140/ 142/ 144/ 150/ 155 Mhz.

Adjustable CPU Core Voltage : CPU Core voltage may be increased in increments of 2.5%, 5%, 7.5%, and 10%, that means 2.05, 2.1, 2.15 and 2.2 volts.

PCI Auto/Speed: The PCI bus speed is automatically set between 30MHz and 41MHz regardless of FSB setting.

Well reading the specs, they sound even more amazing than the new ABIT motherboard. Its huge set of FSB speeds will make you crazy! The addition of the Core Voltage tweak is the final word on tweaking those voltage problems of yours, and this motherboard was definitely designed with overclocking as its primary objective, and of course to compete with ABIT in that field. One interesting thing to point out about this motherboard is the Internal Sensor reading that lets you see the temperature of the internal Pentium II/III core instead of the external sensor in most motherboards and the good old 6BA+. The rest of the specifications are the same like the 6BA+ except for the auto PCI speed 30-41, which, for me, is a bad thing. It would be better to let the user change the PCI speed depending on the Bus speed they set, becase something that is bad at some FSB speeds like 126Mhz, will put the PCI at 30 Mhz ! 3 Mhz less than the normal. Also a side note that supporting 1 GB of Memory, these specs are impressive.

Type:
Hardware/Motherboard

Product
Soyo 6BA+III

Review by DM Eagle

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