Soyo SY-K7AIA AMD 750 ATX Slot-A

The Bad

The biggest issue we had with the K7AIA was that it is based on a chipset that is being phased out and replaced by a more up to date solution, VIA's KX133. While the AGP 4X support of the KX133 doesn't offer a huge performance improvement over the AGP 2X limitation of the AMD 750 chipset, the PC133 memory support of the KX133 can definitely come in handy, especially in professional level applications that are very memory bandwidth dependent.

If you can get past the fact that the K7AIA is using the AMD 750 chipset, then comes the fact that Soyo didn't even bother to use the VIA 686A South Bridge which integrates quite a few functions such as hardware monitoring into the chip itself while doubling as an I/O controller. The highly integrated 686A, which is compatible with the AMD 751 as a North Bridge, does help to lower the overall cost of the motherboard. Soyo was very intent on sticking to the Fester design and it shows.

The lack of any overclocking/voltage tweaking options is somewhat of a letdown, but with the current state of overclocking in the Athlon market essentially being that if you want to overclock you should buy an overclocking card, this downside can be overlooked as not an extremely important factor.

One problem we did notice with the AWARD 6.00PG BIOS setup of the K7AIA is that it did not feature a way to enable/disable SuperBypass which, when enabled, can result in a fairly noticeable performance boost. Unfortunately the board ships with the SuperBypass function disabled meaning that unless you use a third party utility to enable it, you are left without the option enabled. We would like to see Soyo include an option to control this in future updates to the K7AIA's BIOS. Our K7AIA test sample had revision C6 of the AMD 751 North Bridge and fully supported the SuperBypass feature of the chipset.

Because the K7AIA uses the AMD 756 South Bridge, it only supports a maximum of two USB ports which may not be a problem for some, but for others, having two front-mounted USB ports can be very useful.

Overall, we didn't have any real problems with the board, just mainly complaints related to the AMD 750 chipset. After you've seen the KX133, there's no turning back.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB Corsair PC133 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM

Manufacturer: Corsair
Purchase Website: http://www.corsairmicro.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com