Availibility: Now

Founded 14 years ago and convincingly taking its place among the cream of the PC motherboard crop, Soyo has recently been at the forefront in adopting many new motherboard technologies. Adopting Via's Apollo Pro 133 chipset has brought their latest offering to the top as well.

While Intel is still laboring to bring its i820 chipset to market, (all signs currently point to a late October "re-release" of the i820) VIA has quietly made a small niche for those who just can't wait for the latest generation of mainboards. Supporting some of the very same features we will see in the i820, such as UDMA/66 support, AGP2X, and a 133MHz frontside bus with a proper 1/2 AGP clock ratio divider, VIA's chipset has made its mark and is gaining acceptance.

Sporting the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset, Soyo's latest - the SY-6VBA 133 - offers all but one of the features inherent to the i820 chipset -RDRAM support. Utilizing only SDRAM DIMMs at this time, the SY-6VBA 133 is meant to tide over those power hungry users out there while they wait for the i820/RDRAM situation to sort itself out. But it does such a convincing job, and at such a low price, that we think this board may offer just a little bit more that you'd think at first glance

Today we're going to take an in-depth look at Soyo's latest, in all of its UDMA toting, AGP2X smokin', 133 MHz frontside bus glory.

At first glance, design seems not to have been much of a concern for the Soyo engineers as the inconvenience of the layout of some connectors demonstrates. With the RAM slots snug up against the AGP slot, we found it difficult to remove or add RAM without taking out the AGP card. Besides this, the location of the power supply connector is also in a rather awkward. Sandwiched between the CPU and the serial ports, it isn't easy to put the power supply cable in and out.

While the rest of the connections on this board are relatively easy to access, a quick glance will betray the reasoning behind the inconvenient power supply and RAM connectors. This board is jam-packed with slots and for its small form factor, the four RAM connectors, five PCI slots, two ISA slots all fitting snugly is a miracle - and a tradeoff we're willing to make for the minor inconvenience of the misplaced connectors.