All 440BX boards are within a three to four range in most tests and the SY6BA+ IV was no exception.

As in the Abit BE6-II, the HPT366 UDMA/66 controller chips act like a SCSI device and produced benchmark results that equaled our native Intel-based UDMA/66 i820 mainboard's results with identical hard drives.

UDMA/66 offers approximately 10 - 15% faster load times in a single drive environment versus UDMA/33 and the effect is noticeable in even day to day applications.

The SY6BA+ IV, also like the SY6BA+ III, is a strong overclocking platform for CPUs.

It offers a great variety of FSB speeds, voltage adjustment, manual selection of the AGP bus speed divider and hardware temperature monitoring.

It was very stable at the higher bus speeds, managing to POST and bootup Win98 at a speed of 144MHz when using EMS HSDRAM DIMMs.

We'd like to see Soyo allow for greater than a maximum voltage increase of "10%" for the CPU as 2.2 volts often isn't enough to explore the very upper limits of a CPU's overclocking range.

Other than this lone complaint the SY6BA+ IV is a great overclocking platform that excels whether or not the user owns a Celeron or a Pentium III processor.

The SY6BA+ IV is a good evolutionary product that demonstrates the maturity and quality of what will likely be the last generation of 440BX-based mainboards.

It doesn't offer enough advantages for us to recommend buyers upgrade to it if they've already purchased a good 440BX board over the past three months, but if your mainboard is older than that we can heartily recommend the V4 for any needs you may have.

Its mix of feature support and UDMA/66 offer a great platform for any PC, particularly when combined with its aggressive price point.