Soyo 7IS2 Socket 370 Motherboard Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

Soyo 7IS2 Horizontal Profile

Soyo have been around since 1985, but haven’t yet seen their day in the limelight which could have something to do with the lack of mystique in the low-budget arena. In the past few years, they have grown quite a bit and now employ around 400 people. Their more recent boards have been quite good for low budget solutions.

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 board’s specs:

Specs

CPU Interface	Socket 370
Chipset	Intel i815EP
FSB Speeds	66 / 67 / 70 / 75 / 80 / 83 / 100 / 103 / 105 / 110 / 115 / 133 / 134 / 137 / 140 / 145 / 150 / 160 MHz (via BIOS)
Clock Multiples	3 to 8 (0.5 steps)
Core Voltages	+2.5% / +5% / +7.5% (via jumpers)
I/O Voltages	n/a
AGP Voltages	n/a
RAM	3x168pin DIMM slots (PC100/PC133) -- 512MBmax
Expansion	1AGP (4x), 6PCI, 1CNR
PCI IDE	2 ULTRA DMA 33/66/100 channels
Other	Award BIOS with Soyo Combo, voice doctor

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 VIA’s VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset supports, 512MB is still plenty enough for the lion’s share of users – anything greater than this is pretty much overkill unless you’re 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 isn’t enough for any serious overclocking attempts. Not that this matters of course because the FSB and other settings won’t 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.