In the wake of the popularity of the Athlon/Duron platform, Soyo has released 2 Socket A boards of their own: the SY K7VTA B and the SY K7VTA. Soyo Europe was kind enough to provide us with both of them. These two boards look quite similar, but they do have some significant differences in feature set.

The early SY K7VTA is equipped with VIA's older southbridge (82C686A), which supports up a hard disk transfer mode of ATA 66, whereas the SY K7VTA B has the latest ATA 100 capable southbridge (82C686B). One particular enhancement of the K7VTA B is the presence of multiplier DIP switches. This is important addition that makes this product a very attractive choice for overclockers and enthusiasts.

In this review we are going to focus on the K7VTA, as we are working on a separate review on the "B" revision.

First Impressions

Our Soyo K7VTA sample contained the following material.

One ATA 66/100 cable & FDD cable
Printed manual
One CD with motherboard drivers, including a full version of the manual in PDF format and a system monitoring utility
3 in 1 bonus pack CD including: Symantec Norton Antivirus, Norton Ghost & Norton Virtual Drive

Our sample board is equipped with a chipset heatsink and had a printed manual. Interestingly enough, according to the manual (PDF version), this board was based upon a pilot run. Just a small fact that we feel worthy of mention.

The K7VTA's layout looks to be very well designed as all sockets, headers, etc. are where they should be. The adjacent space layout around the CPU socket seems ample enough to handle a pretty big fan/heatsink combo. As a matter of fact, there are 4 holes around the CPU socket for proper cooling by way of custom design heatsinks. The K7VTA offers a sufficient amount of cooling options by providing for 3 fan headers with each of them properly monitored in the system BIOS.

DIMM slots on the K7VTA are situated above the lower end of the AGP socket by about 1/2 inch. The benefit of such placement allows for memory to be in/unstalled without having to remove the AGP video card first. In some small ATX cases, the outermost DIMM socket might be rendered useable as it is a bit too close to the back of a CD ROM unit. All IDE/FDD connectors are easily within reach and all slots can handle full sized add in cards. To contribute to the cause of system stability, the K7VTA is equipped with 13 x 1500µF and 15 x 1000µF capacitors. Overall, a well designed board.