Soyo K7VTA PRO

Company: Soyo
Product: K7VTA PRO Motherboard
Street Price: ~ $150
Complete Motherboard Spec's: Soyo Spec's
Date Reviewed: February 27, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Overclocking:

I used the same Duron 800 from the KT7A-RAID review, but this time I also have a 1GHz T-Bird that was supplied to me from PCNut! (Which they have some awesome combo deals going on right now.) I used the same components as before (basically I just swapped out the boards on my test bench), but I will list them again just so you don't have to dig through the ABIT review.

While the Soyo BIOS has many tweaks in it, one BIG thing that is missing is VIO adjustment. There are a few other smaller things that are missing, but nothing to make a fuss over. There is CPU voltage adjustment which you can go up to +0.25v, which would show 1.92v for the CPU's, on my ABIT board I could only go up to 1.85v (system reported 1.89v).

The same Duron that would only run stable at 133FSB on the KT7A-RAID would run stable at 143FSB on the K7VTA PRO! However on the flip side, the Athlon that would run stable at 150FSB on the KT7A-RAID would only run stable at 145FSB on the K7VTA PRO. Confusing isn't it? These are two different board designs, and I'm sure the BIOSes are pretty different too. Still, 143-145 is very respectable and about the average for most people. There are extreme cases where people have been running their boards (from various manufacturers) at 166FSB, and there are times when 133FSB is the max. Also keep in mind this is the first BIOS release for this board, generally with future BIOS updates there is increased performance & stability.

Benchmarks:

In the following benchmarks of the Soyo K7VTA PRO they were compared to the ABIT KT7A-RAID using the same Duron @ 800MHz (6 x 133) with the same components.

Sandra Benchmarks
CPU - Soyo	CPU - ABIT
Memory - Soyo	Memory - ABIT
MultiMedia - Soyo	MultiMedia - ABIT

As you can see the two boards are just about neck and neck in performance except for memory which the ABIT has a good 30MB/s better score. Perhaps in future BIOS releases Soyo will be able to fine tune the settings to squeeze a little more performance. However it could also be that these less aggressive timings are what makes the difference when overclocking past 133FSB which the Soyo can do with the Duron, but not the ABIT.

Go On To Page 4