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VIA has recently entered the integrated mainboard chipset market with the release of the VIA PM 133, a Socket 370 based chipset. This chipset is essentially a combination of the VIA Apollo 133A chipset coupled with the S3 Savage 2000 2D core and S3's Savage4 3D core.
85% Rating: 
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Soyo 7VMA |
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Overclocking and Conclusions
Soyo has been manufacturing
motherboards with a good potential in overclocking for quite sometime now and
the 7VMA is no exception. When we learned that the 7VMA did not offer for more
than a 10% Vcore increase, we were quite skeptical. Add to this the fact that
the 7VMA supports only 2 fan headers and lacks the option to increase/decrease
FSBs by 1MHz. However, once we sat down for business, we were really quite
amazed and what we saw.
Despite these limitations, we were able to
overclock a Celeron 566MHz CPU to 850MHz at a lowly core voltage of
1.65V! No other board reviewed on PCstats has managed to accomplish
this at a voltage less than 1.85V. That's pretty special...
Overall, our
overclocking tests showed that the 7VMA is an extremely well designed board with
superb overclocking capabilities although some desired feature are lacking.
Lastly, it is worthy to mention that the area next surrounding the Socket 370
interface looks clean enough for a rather large heatsink. Overclockers
enjoy!
Conclusions
VIA's Apollo Pro 133A has had plenty of time to mature the past
year and the PM 133 chipset builds upon what the Apollo Pro 133A has become. We
are quite happy with Soyo's incorporation of the PM 133 chipset. It offers
excellent stability, a good feature set, solid performance, very good integrated
3D performance and a rather simple yet effective overclocking feature
set.
Aside from these characteristics, one key point to observe is its
relatively lower cost in comparison with a similarly configured i815/i815E based
board. The latest revision of the 7VMA, the 7VMA B sports the newer VT82C686B
southbridge that adds ATA/100 support. And there is no doubt that users will
appreciate this new addition.
All in all, we are impressed with the Soyo
7VMA. Irrespective of its target market, this board should be attractive to a
wide spectrum of users. Power hungry users will be satisfied by its performance
and gamers will appreciate the available AGP slot. Though we found its sheer
strength in overclocking to be excellent, its lack of 1MHz might deter those
looking to "tune" their efforts for ideal performance. But for around $115,
there really isn't much to complain
about.
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