Date: August 5th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: SoyoUSA
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PRODUCT FEATURES & PICTORIAL

Let's get on to what this motherboard offers for the money....

The CPU cooler bracket is relatively obstruction free and any cooler installation will not be too bad if you mind the capacitors just above the socket and the encroaching northbridge heatsink. To avoid any possible twisting of the motherboard during your heatsink installation, Soyo included a rear bracket which adds a significant amount of rigidity to the cooler bracket and the socket area.

To the immediate right of the bracket are three 3pin fan headers for two CPU and one case fan.

The board supports 2Gb of single channel DDR400 ram or 1Gb in Dual channel configuration. To the right of the memory slots you will find the floppy and main ATX power supply connector neatly tucked into the top portion of the motherboard.

The P4 specific power connection is unfortunately poorly placed on the complete opposite side of the motherboard tucked behind the rear I/O connections. Having it placed in such an odd area will add to wiring clutter and when the motherboard is installed in case, the wiring could potentially interfere with the processor cooling fan. Now some people might think that this is not a big issue, but I have been unnerved in the past by having a cooling fan catch the 12volt wire and cut through the insulation which could potentially cause a short and/or motherboard failure and damage.

The bottom right hand corner houses the case connector panel and the standard IDE and IDE RAID harddrive connectors. One major situation I can see here is the when all IDE connector are used, there will be quite a mess of IDE cables whether standard or rounded. With such a blockage, airflow will be impeded greatly.