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The mainboard gives us some very nice options like
Ultra DMA-66 (the ability to read 66Mb/sec with a compatible Ultra DMA66 Hard
drive). Also it supports all Pentium Slot-1 based processors ranging from the
Celeron 266 up-to Pentium III 866 MHz. Other specs worthy of a notice are its
support for three PC 133MHz SDRAM modules, Wake on LAN, hardware monitoring
support and the very easy to set FSB speeds jumperless and CPU voltage adjusting
up-to a 7.5% higher core ( very nice for overclocking the CPU!)
While we are at overclocking, SOYO stuffed the board with a nice
selection of FSB's:
66 68 75 80 83 85 90 95 100 103 105 109 112 114 115 118 120 124
126 129 133 135 138 140 141 143 145 147 150 154 160 and 166
Ultra DMA-66 Bus master IDE - Synchronous Ultra DMA mode provides data transfer rates up-to a maximum of
66Mb per second. Which roughly is twice the data rate of enhanced IDE or ATA-2.
Ultra ATA requires a special (included) IDE cable. Although the cable has 40
pins, it actually uses 80 wires.
Hint - always connect the cable in this
fashion: Blue to mainboard, Gray
to slave and black to master.
The mainboard - When you take a good look at the mobo
you'll notice that Soyo has done a great job in its development. The boards
lay-out is very good. Everything seems to be at the right place. The CPU-fan
connector is close to the CPU, the power-connector is free from any havoc and
surrounding cables or processor, connectors are close to each other and can be
easily red from the mobo (IDE1,IDE2,DIMM1, etc). The mainboard makes a solid
impression and seems to be made of quality components. One downside, the AGP
slot is intervening with the memory modules. You cannot remove a DIMM
without removing the AGP videocard first.
Stability - At first we had severe compatibility issues with the 6VCA. I tried to install a
Coppermine based Intel pentium III 500E on this baby and it simply would not
remain stable. Turns out that the problem simply was memory CAS settings. On
other mainboards a memory setting of CAS2 would remain stable (the lower the CAS
number the better performance) Unfortunately we had to set the memory back to a
CAS3 setting which decreased a bit performance. Now that the board is running
stable we have been running the 6VCA for 24 hrs constantly in some
time-demo's. Stability was is excellent, we have noticed no flaws, errors or
crashes whatsoever.
A possible explanation for CAS
stability is the fact that memory modules simply do not remain stable at
133 MHz with CAS2, not a mainboard problem but a memory module issue.
It's recommended to enable CAS3. At this time we can only recommend
Corsair CM654A128-133C2 memory at CAS2. About all available PC100
modules can work at CAS2 but you will have to enable a busspeed of 100
MHz.
Soyo has taken the standard Award BIOS and
improved upon it just a bit by simplifying performance due to tweaking. The Bios
has been setup in a way that is easy to understand and has nifty overclocking
options thanks to VCORE changes and a heap load of FSB settings upto 166
MHz.
The 6VCA comes with the normal standard setup of
connectors, two high speed 16550 compatible serial ports, one multi-node
parallel port (SPP/EPP/ECP), two universal serial bus ports+ two in the
mainboard, PS/2 keyboard and of course a PS/2 mouse port.
** Furthermore a note all mainboard
manufacturers. All mainboards these days have connectors for two USB ports.
Furthermore we can find another 2 port USB solution on the mainboard, however
they are practically useless since we cannot use one single port of them because
no-one ships proper cables with them, yes manufacturers fail to ship the
necessary cables to connect these USB ports.
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