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In the wake of the popularity of the Athlon/Duron platform, Soyo has released 2 Socket A boards of their own: the SY K7VTA B and the SY K7VTA. Soyo Europe was kind enough to provide us with both of them. These two boards look quite similar, but they do have some significant differences in feature set.
90% Rating: 
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Soyo K7VTA |
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Memory Bandwidth Performance
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According to
SiSoft Sandra 2001 scores, the K7VTA offers top notch memory performance.
However, we must not give too much credit to this test since it's a low level
test which was not meant to benchmark overall board performance. The K7VTA (as
well as the K7VTA B) is the fastest socket A board ever tested here in terms of
memory bandwidth. Soyo has managed to squeeze all the bandwidth there is from
the VIA KT 133 platform. As we show in our business/gaming scores, the K7VTA
excels in benchmarks were memory bandwidth is a key concern.
The K7VTA is equipped with a Sigmatel 9721T AC97 codec. The same
audio CODEC can be found in many medium priced sound cards available today.
After giving it a listen it sounded as though audio was accompanied with a great
deal of interference. In fact, the noise only seemed to amplify while moving
around or opening windows on the desktop. If you're serious about how good your
audio sounds, you might want to grab a third party addition.
Most Soyo boards
we've tested so far have had incredible overclocking capabilities. The K7VTA is
an exception because it does not have any manual multiplier adjustments. So we
had to rely on front side bus overclocking. The board was stable up to 105MHz
FSB (which results in a 630MHz overclock). While this increase may look small,
we must not forget that this board has excellent overall
performance.
The Soyo K7VTA amazed us with its good performance and stability.
In terms of feature set, this board has no ATA 100 support, no support for AMD
133MHz FSB processors and no multiplier adjustments. On the other hand, it's
clear that Soyo has worked very hard to make this board a very fast and reliable
platform. All in all, this product should be taken into consideration,
especially when overclocking is not the ultimate goal. Of course, as we will
see, the K7VTA B with the multiplier adjustments is a perfect choice for any
hard core
overclocker.
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