Soyo's SY6BA+IV

 The Soyo's SY-6BA+IV

 The immortal motherboard!

 Benchmarks

We'll try to cover the bases here but be concise. We didn't have any great surprises either way with any of the benchmarks. Just pure rock solid performance from the SY-6BA+IV.

Wintune 98

This is the last Wintune 98 Benchmark you will see here at Hot Hardware. It is getting old an out dated, not to mention the fact the it is now 1999! However, it is still a relatively stable platform for benchmarking and a good basis for comparison vrs. the BE6.

The OpenGL benchmarks are slightly skewed due to the fact that we have Matrox's new TurboGL Drivers installed now. However, the video is not what is important. For these tests, key in on the CPU numbers and the Drive Performance number. These are the two areas of main concern since graphics performance will vary from video card to video card. The drive performance numbers are very comparable since we use the WD Drive as a base system drive for all of our motherboard tests now. In short, the SY-6BA+IV is smack-dab right on par with the Abit BE6 in both CPU numbers and drive throughput. Some numbers are slightly higher and some slightly lower but all in all, there is no real significant difference.

*** Note: Soyo has since released the next revision of the HighPoint Technologies DMA66 BIOS which is embedded in the Motherboard BIOS. Word around the net is that the new version yields a 25-30% performance increase. This is a general release of course and will be available to other motherboard manufacturers who have designed with the same HighPoint chipset.

 Winbench 99

Once again, just for yuks we compared the scores to the BE6 and needless to say they are neck and neck.

SiSoft Sandra

Things were working so smoothly that we decided to run a Sandra Benchmark. Look at the way the 558MHz. overclock skunks the P!!!-500 reference system but the integer performance is slightly less than the K6(3)-500!

 In Summary

The Soyo SY-6BA+IV is a nice blend of mature Intel BX chipset technology with the latest and greatest drive controller technology form HighPoint. DMA66 gives the drive subsystem a nice boost. In addition, the stability of this board is second to known. We experienced no incompatibilities or system crashes of any kind during the tests. If you are shopping around for a new motherboard, you really can't go wrong with the SY-6BA+IV. Nicely done, Soyo...

 We give the Soyo SY-6BA+IV a Hot Hardware Temp-O-Meter Rating of...

95 !

-Davo

(Temp-O-Meter scores are rated on a number of key metrics including performance, stability, ease of installation, compatibility, feature set, "overclockability" and component quality. A perfect score is 100 )