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Soyo has been one of the most well known motherboard manufacturers around the world for quite sometime now. In the last few years Soyo's boards have build up a good reputation for their overclocking capabilities. With the introduction of the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset, pretty much every motherboard manufacturer out there began to release their own motherboards based on this chipset. In this review we will be taking a look at the Soyo 6VCA which is based on the Via Apollo Pro 133A.
75% Rating: 
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Test Bed (cont)
On the Soyo 6VCA
& Soyo 7VCA, we enabled the HOSTCLK +33MHz memory speed option. This means
that the memory was clocked at 100MHz although the processor was using a 66MHz
bus. Enabling this setting on the DFI TA64 B resulted in stability problems and
we were forced not to use it. The DFI CA61 simply did not have this option to
begin with.
Boards which do support the above option have a performance
advantage as it increases the memory bandwidth up to 50% (100MHz v/s 66MHz).
When using 100MHz bus processors the memory advantage of this feature is at most
33% (133MHz v/s 100MHz). Of course, this feature cannot work with 133MHz bus
CPUs since in that case, the memory will have to be clocked at a pretty much
impossible 166MHz.
All BIOS settings were tweaked for maximum performance
on all of the tested boards. All boards with an AC97 CODEC had the CODEC
disabled and an Orchid Nusound PCI soundcard was used for audio output in its
place.
Windows 98 was installed from scratch on every motherboard in this
test and installed only the necessary drivers, benchmarks and games. We measured
business performance using Ziff Davis' Content Creation Winstone 2000 1.0 and
Business Winstone 99 1.2. I also used Quake 3 (1.11 version) full installation
to get gaming performance scores. For Quake 3 scores we used the default
demo001, normal graphics, low sound quality and all other default
options.
Of course this score is affected a lot by the speed of your
processor and 3D accelerator and not so much by your motherboard. So if your
scores are lower or higher than the reported in this test then this doesn't mean
your motherboard is worse or better than the tested boards.
Business
Performance
By looking at the business
performance charts, it is clear that the Soyo 6VCA offers excellent performance.
It is definitely one of the fastest VIA Apollo Pro 133A based boards and it is
as fast as Soyo 7VCA (socket 370, Via Apollo Pro 133A based motherboard).
Perhaps the only befitting competition would be a solid Intel BX based platform.
Of course, when it comes to AGP and hard drive bandwidth, a board like the 6VCA
can outperform any stock Intel BX based board with
ease.
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