The V3's size is fairly standard, which means that installation was hassle-free. Interestingly Soyo has equipped the V3 with a small, green, LED that lights up whenever the ATX power cable is connected to the board.

The LED serves one purpose, to let the user know whether or not they've shorted the board out. In testing mainboards we've only zapped one or two out of about 25, but when we did we would have given a lung for a simple LED to let us know that the board was dead rather than us trying 850 different ways to push power through the dead board's carcass.

Soyo includes a "Quick Start Guide" with the V3 that turns out to be more detailed than some mainboard vendor's actual full-sized manuals.

Full documentation for the V3 is included on a CD that's distributed with each board, and it's extremely well done. We'd rather see everything in print when it comes to mainboards instead of CD-manuals since no one can read or troubleshoot out of a CD when their PC isn't running.

Performance in system-level benchmarks that we ran showed the V3 to be a sharp board that delivers the standard level of 440BX speed that we've come to expect. Also, there were no surprises during testing at the default 66 and 100MHz FSB speed levels, which is always nice.