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Introduction
The SY-7IS2 is a Socket370 motherboard based on the Intel i815EP chipset. The i815E introduced ATA100 and a second USB controller to the i815 chipset and the only major difference with the i815EP is the removal of onboard video. Here are the rest of the boards specs: Specs
The max 512MB of RAM is a limitation of the i815 chipset and all motherboards using this chipset share the same limitation. Some consider this to be an artificial limitation imposed by Intel to make their more expensive i820 and i840 chipsets more attractive. Even though this is a third of the amount of RAM that VIAs VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset supports, 512MB is still plenty enough for the lions share of users anything greater than this is pretty much overkill unless youre running a server or workstation. The overclocking features on this board leave quite a bit to be desired. The two major elements in overclocking, the FSB speeds and the CPU voltage settings, make only a sparse appearance. The range of FSB speeds will only allow for modest overclocking needs and are more of a novelty than anything else. The core voltage settings are given in percentages rather than using actual values. If you do the math, these percentages work out to 0.04125V (2.5%), 0.0825V (5%), and 0.12375V (7.5%) for 1.65V CPUs (900MHz and below) and 0.0425V, 0.085V, and 0.1275V for 1.7V CPUs (900MHz and above). This means that the highest Vcore setting possible is 1.8275 which isnt enough for any serious overclocking attempts. Not that this matters of course because the FSB and other settings wont get one very far anyway. On the upside, there are onboard jumper settings for manually selecting the FSB speed range (66MHz, 100MHz, or 133MHz), but the board can also be configured to auto detect the speed for a given CPU. The 6 PCI slots are great to see. This provides a tremendous amount of expansion potential for future upgrades. The CNR slot is all but useless for end users as they are only used as cost cutting features by OEMs. Because of this it would have been ideal for Soyo to include a single ISA slot for those old legacy cards that are still kicking around instead of the CNR.
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