Manufacturer Soyo
Retail Price $105

Expansion Slot : 5/2/1 

If you recall the tortuous and involved BIOS history of the original Soyo SY-6BA board, perhaps it won’t come as a surprise that the SY-6BA+ sequel comes with a BIOS that is nothing short of excellent. Practice makes perfect, I suppose. You get feedback on PCI and AGP clock rates and you can choose whether to run the AGP clock at full FSB speed or at 66% of the FSB. FSB support, by the way, ranges from the conventional 66/100MHz to the comparatively rare 124MHz. Even if you’re not the overclocking type, it’s nice to know all the potential exists in case you ever feel the need to try it. You also get a plethora of hardware monitoring features- voltage, system temperature, CPU temperature, fan RPMs- in the BIOS, which is a welcome bonus to overclockers even if it’s a “so what?” for others. Then you get options to tweak SDRAM and to manually configure IRQ and DMA allocations, and of course, that now practically-required feature, BIOS adjustable CPU settings. OK, so there’s no voltage manipulation, which remains the province of the ABIT BH6/BX6 boards, but other than that there’s everything and the kitchen sink.
 

The Soyo Sy-6BA+ is very much an overclocker’s board. With support for extra FSB speeds like 124MHz, temperature monitoring & adjustable CPU settings in the BIOS, the SY-6BA+ more or less sails through most hoops you’d care to set up. In terms of stability, the board is right up there in the upper echelons. The board has 5 PCI, 2 ISA slots (one of these is a shared PCI/ISA slot) and an AGP slot, not to mention 4 DIMM slots. That last means, of course, that (like some other motherboards in this roundup) the board supports up to 1GB of RAM, though its unlikely that anyone is gonna hit that barrier anytime soon.  As you’re sick and tired of being told now, the performance differences between BX boards are negligible, but since we’re talking differences, let’s just mention that the 6BA+ scores nearer to the upper end of those selfsame negligible differences. If you’re in the market for a BX board- and even if you aren’t- take a good long look at this board. It’s not often that boards like this come along.

 

Not counting the missing voltage manipulation feature, this board boasts practically every important feature you could ask for. More importantly, they work.  The BIOS is outstanding and will be eagerly welcomed by everyone from hardcore overclockers to occasionally- tweak-something users. This board is definitely one to take into very serious consideration when you’re picking out a new BX board. I won’t rhapsodize about it any more here because we’ve still got a couple more motherboards to go through. Next!