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Taking
a look at the BIOS of the K7ADA, we again find
some good and some "no so" good
things...
Soyo's
Combo Feature is similar to Abit's Softmenu
III. On some other Soyo boards it's
comparable, but on the K7ADA there are no
multiplier or voltage adjustments available in the
BIOS. Multipliers must be chosen and voltage
adjustments must be made using two banks of DIP
Switches (Multipliers between 5 - 12.5 are
selectable. Voltages between 1.1 - 1.85V in
.25V increments are selectable). FSBs,
however are selectable from within the BIOS...not
in 1MHz increments, but close enough as you can
see in the first picture.
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| Overclocking
With The Soyo K7ADA |
| It's
In There! |
|
We had
fairly good luck when overclocking with this
board. We were able to take our 750MHz
T-Bird over the 1GHz barrier. We upped the
multiplier to 8 and brought the FSB to 133MHz
(266MHz effective), for 1.064GHz. The CPU
voltage was not changed.
The
H.H. Test Rig was configured as follows....
 |
| Test
System |
| The
baseline for performance |
|
Soyo SY-K7ADA
Motherboard (ALi MAGiK 1) with an Athlon Processor
@ 750 & 1064MHz.
128MB
of Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM,
IBM
DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
nVidia
GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card
Sound
Blaster Live X-Gamer
Adaptec
AHA-2940 SCSI Controller
Plextor
UltraPLEX 40Max
Windows
Millennium
Direct
X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers V.6.50
 |
| Head-to-Head
/ Performance |
| The
Soyo K7ADA versus the Abit KT7A |
|
The
first test we ran was a low resolution Quake 3
timedemo (Demo001). With Quake 3 set to a
low resolution, using a high end video card (a GF2
Ultra in our case), your framerates are limited by
the CPU installed in the system. For the
sake of comparison, we have included the
framerates achieved in our recent review of the
Abit KT7A-RAID. This test was run with the
CPU set to the exact same speed on both
motherboards, 1.064GHz.
QUAKE
3 ARENA
Hmmmm...What
happened? Shouldn't the DDR system be
faster? Well it should, but due to VIA's
better AGP implementation and the relative
immaturity of the ALi MAGiK 1, the KT133A based
Abit board wins in this test. We suspect the
numbers on the Soyo board will improve over time
though.
Using
a PC isn't just about gaming though, is it?
I'd like to answer that question with a resounding
"YES" but we all have to get some real
work done on our PCs once in a while. To
simulate the performance of "Office"
type applications, we ran ZD's Business Winstone,
again pitting the K7ADA versus the KT7A-RAID.
BUSINESS
WINSTONE
Here
the tables have turned ever so slightly and the
Soyo board comes out on top.
More
Winstone, Sandra and The Rating |
