Alright then, let's
dig a little deeper into the options that Soyo
SY-K7VTA BIOS provides.
 |
| Installation
/ Setup With The SY-K7VTA |
| Very
forgiving |
|
In general, the
"feel" of this board when setting it up
was very forgiving. We had no issues with
resource conflicts and the board booted upon first
power up. However, the SY-K7VTA does have a
fairly unique feature should something go awry on
you during installation. Soyo's "Voice
Doctor" feature will give you audible voice
instructions through the PC Speaker diagnosing a
problem. We removed the SDRAM DIMM module
and hit the power button at one point and guess
what? It worked... A female (albeit
faint) voice was heard telling us that main system
memory was not present and to check for proper
installation. This was a nice touch
indeed.
And now we give you
the BIOS setup...
CPU
FSB
Settings
CPU Voltage Settings
SDRAM
Timings
Health Monitoring
As you
can see, the BIOS provides an excellent array of
Front Side Bus Speed settings and it also has the
ability to tweak the CPU Core Voltage well above
specifications. However, as most of
you are aware, bus speed settings above 110MHz. on
the Athlon or Duron EV6 DDR bus are rarely
usable. We have seen a few boards that
handle well up to 115MHz. but those are few and
far between. The SY-K7VTA is not one of
them.
This
is a good point for a lead into to over-clocking
with this board.
The
Hot Hardware Crew would like to thank our friends
at PCNut
Computers for providing the AMD T-Bird
Athlon chip used in this review. Our chip
was a "special" so to speak, in that it
was hand picked by PCNut
and the L1 Cache Bridges were reconnected with a
conductive pencil. This will allow
multiplier changes as long as the motherboard
supports it. Unfortunately, the SY-K7VTA
does not. Let's have a look at this little
baby.
Click
to see the Blueness
This
is known as a "Blue Core" T-Bird that
was manufactured at AMD's Dresden plant and has
copper interconnects internally. The folks
at PCNut
have proven this chip out to 1.1GHz. with full
stability! If you shake you funky groove
thang over to PCNut
real quick, they may even have a few of these
left. So, what are you waiting for?
 |
| Overclocking
With The SY-K7VTA |
| One
step away from greatness |
|
As we
mentioned before, the SY-K7VTA (at least the rev.
we tested) does not have the ability to change CPU
Multiplier settings. Although, we have heard
of reports on the net that Soyo may be adding this
feature in future revisions.
We
were able to bump the FSB up a little bit with the
help of voltage but it wasn't much to write home
about. Click it...
We
were only able to get a measly 3MHz. (6MHz. DDR)
boost to the FSB. We could boot the system
at 107MHz. FSB but it would lock upon loading
Windows and that was at any voltage we
selected. If there was only the ability to
change the CPU Multiplier, this board could really
shine here. With it's plethora of voltage
settings in the BIOS, it is a natural for
this. AMD's platform just doesn't like its
bus speed messed with too much, as has been widely
reported. As a result, the only real way to
successfully over-clock the T-Bird is through
multiplier adjustment, so we were left a little
short with the K7VTA.
As a
side note, we did check to see that AGP 4X was at
least setup properly.
Things
look good here. Let's move out... |
