Soyo SY-K7VTA KT133 Socket-A ATX (Production)

The most important achievement by Soyo on the retail version of the SY-K7VTA lies in the set of four dipswitches on the front side of the board. After modifying a set of jumpers to enable the feature, the 4 dipswitches provide a total of 16 multiplier ratio settings, 5 / 5.5 / 6 / 6.5 / 7 / 7.5 / 8 / 8.5 / 9 / 9.5 / 10 / 10.5 / 11 / 11.5 / 12 / 12.5. Yes, that means theoretically you can overclock any Thunderbird or Duron processors to 1.25GHz (100MHz x 12.5) by changing the multiplier ratios. Practically, that is not possible because of heat issues and CPU yield, but there is no doubt that changing the multiplier is a much better way to overclock AMD processors than by just increasing the FSB.

Multiplier overclocking is by far the easiest way to overclock your AMD Duron or Athlon for a few simple reasons. Most important is the fact that the KT133 chipset is currently unable to run the FSB above 110MHz while maintaining stability in the vast majority of cases. However, most AMD processors that are currently available are "multiplier locked", meaning that users are not able to change the multiplier easily. We put that in quotes because "unlocking" these CPU's is as simple as reconnecting the L1 bridges on the processor. If you are interested in knowing how to unlock AMD processors and overclocking, please refer to our "AMD Thunderbird & Duron Overclocking Revealed" article.

At the beginning changing the multiplier ratios was just a privilege of ABIT and ASUS. But like we said in the Microstar K7T Pro2 Review, this is not going to be the case anymore. At this point, Microstar, EPoX, Soyo, FIC, and QDI have already released their new KT133 solutions that include the multiplier settings. Most of them are just a slight revision of the already existing versions, so that means it only needs some hardware tweaks to enable this new feature, and it is clear that other companies will follow the path soon to include the multiplier settings on their boards.

Unlike the ABIT KT7 and the Microstar K7T Pro2, users will have to play with the dipswitches on the board instead of changing the ratios inside the BIOS. Fortunately, besides this, everything else is pretty much jumperless. The SY-K7VTA is using the Award Modular BIOS 6.00PG, and Soyo adds in the Soyo Combo Setup, which provides some more tweaking options.. FSB options include 90 / 95 / 100 / 101 / 102 / 103 / 105 / 107 / 109 / 110 / 113 / 115 / 117 / 120 MHz. Ideally, settings in 1 MHz increments, at least between 100 and 110 MHz range, would be the best, but this should be enough for most users already. As noted above, sometimes users are able to set FSB above 110MHz, but that's not very common.

Without tweaking the CPU core voltage, you're limiting your overclocking potential. With that in mind, Soyo also includes a set of core voltage tweaks as well. Users can stay with the default voltage, 0.025 - 0.250V above, or 0.025 - 0.100V below, all in 0.025V increments. In the PC Health panel of the BIOS, you can read about the temperature of the CPU and the system temperature, the speeds of two fans, and also the core voltage of the CPU.

Once again, it is more useful to see how changing of multiplier ratios helps in overclocking. We used the pre-production sample of the SY-K7VTA and the retail version of the board, and try to overclock the AMD 800MHz OEM Thunderbird processor under the exact same setup. For the pre-production sample, possibly due to the lack of FSB settings, we could only hit 103MHz. 107MHz, which is already the next setting after 103MHz, caused the system not able to load Windows. So the clock speed was limited to only a mere 824MHz (103MHz x 8). Using the retail version of the SY-K7VTA, things are totally different. We first fixed the FSB at 100MHz and increase the multiplier. We were able to reach 9.5 before the system lost its stability. Then we started to increase the FSB, and 105MHz seemed to be the limit. That means the exact same Thunderbird CPU was running at a clock speed of 997.5MHz (105MHz x 9.5). This is a huge margin in performance increase if you consider that we are using the same processor. One thing to notice is that we did not change the CPU core voltage for fair comparison.

Stability is definitely one of the most important factors in choosing a motherboard. No matter how fast the board is or how much it can help in overclocking the CPU, it will be useless if the board is not stable. Soyo has done a very good job in this category. In the pre-production sample of the SY-K7VTA, there are a total of thirteen 1500uF capacitors sitting around the CPU socket, and stability tests placed it above the average. In the retail version of the SY-K7VTA, Soyo made some changes and put a total of eleven1500uF capacitors and one 3300uF capacitor around the CPU socket. Although the total count of capacitors is lower, the 3300uF capacitor and the redesign actually help to make the board even more stable. In our stability tests, the board crashed a total of 3 times in a 24-hour span, which is very good. Unfortunately, some of the capacitors are quite close to the CPU-socket, so users with larger heat sinks might have problems installing them.