Anand brengt ons een review van de Soyo SY-K7AIA Slot-A moederplank, gebaseerd op AMD's good ol' Irongate chipset. Helaas is Soyo er een beetje laat bij met haar Athlon bordje en is het waarschijnlijk beter om even te wachten op een goed KX133 mobo.
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.
Thanks Nevyn voor de link.
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