$175 buys a lot of features these days, even full motion compensation for flawless DVD-playback via the Rage128 accelerator. Other amenities that mainstream users will appreciate on the SY-6IBM are its hardware voltage monitoring ability as well as its support for up to 768MB of main system DRAM.

One of the few negatives we found with the SY-6IBM was its limited amount of PCI slots. Purchasers of the SY-6IBM will have to get by with three PCI slots and one ISA slot, which isn't bad considering that most integrated boards include less than that currently. Still, we'd like to see a minimum of four PCI slots on every mainboard on the market, even though there likely aren't many PCI slot-gobbling Voodoo2 SLI rigs left now with the advent of a faster generation of video accelerators so PCI slots aren't at as much of a premium as they were last year.

We found the Yamaha sound chip to be adequate for all sound production save for DirectSound3D or A3D implementation within games since it doesn't support those APIs. It did however sound better than the last SoundBlaster PCI128 card we utilized, a strong plus considering that the PCI128 isn't a poor product. If SY-6IBM goes into a system that will use a two speaker setup then the Yamaha sound processor should fill the user's needs quite well.

Likewise, video performance from the Rage128VR chipset was more than adequate for almost any role handed to it, even gaming in fact, although it's clearly outgunned by dedicated video accelerators based on the TNT2 and Voodoo3 chips. With just 8MB of local SDRAM, the Rage128VR isn't going to set any land speed records, but it does allow 2D resolutions as high as 1600x1200x16bpp, and 3D resolutions up to 1024x768x32bpp. The video signal was sharp at all times when testing the SY-6IBM, and the color saturation was clear and deep.