Soyo SY-K7AIA AMD 750 ATX Slot-A

It is up to the individual motherboard manufacturers to take that design and manipulate it in whatever ways they deem fit in order to decrease the costs and mold the board into something that appropriately fits their motherboard lines as well as the needs of their OEMs. It is for this reason that you see boards like the Soyo K7AIA outfitted with 5/2/1 (PCI/ISA/AGP) expansion slot configuration instead of the 4/3/1 configuration on the Fester. Since the Fester was never meant for sale AMD didn't have to worry about producing a board with great expansion options, rather they needed something that functioned properly and to the best of its ability to properly demonstrate the capabilities of the Athlon platform. As you can guess, by sticking to AMD's reference design, Soyo could cut off some of the precious design time associated with bringing a motherboard like the K7AIA to market and was thus able to begin shipping the board not too long after the decision to produce it was made.

The benefits associated with following the Fester reference design closely are mainly related to the fact that the Fester is a tried and true design that is above all, stable and reliable. These two features are the biggest and most desired features of any motherboard and if you have a design that hasn't been proven through extensive usage tests then you can never be 100% sure of its long-term reliability/stability. By using the Fester reference design, Soyo essentially has a guaranteed reliable design provided that they don't screw it up with any of their modifications to the board which would deviate from the reference design.

Because of its roots in the AMD Fester reference design, the board is much like the Gigabyte GA-7IX. With 5 PCI slots the K7AIA is capable of handling most of your expansion needs and the 3 DIMM slots present on the board are carried over directly from the Fester which also features the 3 banks in a similar layout. The only complaint we have here is the positioning of the ATX Power Supply connector between the Slot-A connector and the DIMM slots. By placing the ATX Power Supply connector here, larger heatsink/fan combos will have problems being used in this space. You have about 2.25" (~5.7 cm) of space to work with here, which is fine for most cooling devices but some of the more extreme units may have troubles fitting in these cramped quarters.

Behind the Slot-A interface connector we have the row of 8 heatsink mounted voltage regulators which is taken directly from the Fester design, as well as the sole 1000uF capacitor towards the left side of the Slot-A connector. While the capacitors on the K7AIA aren't the high quality and expensive Nichicon capacitors that we've seen on Intel and AMD manufactured motherboards, they are just as capable of controlling the power signals supplied to the components mounted on the K7AIA. Soyo had to cut costs somewhere, but it is impressive that they chose to stick so closely to the Fester design even down to the voltage regulators and capacitor placement.

The K7AIA's similarity to the Fester reference board extends past the physical and into the board's stability as it faired quite nicely in our tests. While it wasn't as stable as the Fester, it provided reliable and stable operation. Nothing fancy, the K7AIA just gets the job done.

According to Soyo's K7AIA Spec Sheet the board supports a variety of adjustable FSB frequencies, more specifically the following FSB settings are listed on the board's spec sheet: 66 / 75 / 81 / 83 / 90 / 95 / 100 and 105MHz. Unfortunately our test sample did not feature these options for FSB settings, rather the only two selectable options in the Soyo Combo Setup section of the AWARD 6.00PG BIOS were 100MHz and 133MHz for the K7AIA's FSB setting. The latter wouldn't work at all on the K7AIA (no Athlon motherboard to date has been able to even so much as POST at 133MHz DDR FSB) and the board would simply default to the 100MHz FSB setting.

Hardware monitoring on the K7AIA is provided for by the Winbond 83782D. The 83782D is the successor to the 83781D and offers one key advantage - the ability to read CPU temperature from the on-die thermal diode of any 0.25 micron or 0.18 micron Intel CPU. Reading from the on-die thermal diode offers the most accurate CPU temperature possible. But since it is being used on a motherboard that won't be hosting an Intel CPU, this feature isn't really of any use on the K7AIA.

Soyo followed the Fester reference design and placed a thermistor right next to the Slot-A connector which is where the CPU temperature readings are actually taken.

The 83782D offers monitoring for 9 voltages, 3 temperatures, and 3 fan speeds. Case intrusion is supported as is the CPU VID detection of the correct Vcore. Those 2 additional voltages allow for monitoring of just about every voltage in the system, usually +/-5V, +/-12V, +3.3V, Vcore, VTT, +5Vsb, and Vbat.

The board is bundled with the usual from Soyo, a Quick Start Guide, a drivers/utilities CD that has drivers for the AMD 750 chipset for Win9x/NT and a CD with copies of Norton AntiVirus, Ghost and VirtualDrive on it.