BIOS
SOYO have continually impressed me with their BIOSes for both AMD and Intel platforms. Usually going under the name of COMBO, they have been tweakable, robust, and user-friendly. Let's see if this particular one has changed.
The above shows a screen-grab highlighting the first screen you come to after pressing the delete key during boot-up. I like the way it's laid out. Everything you need is here - only the bare essentials use jumpers on the board itself. Let's cut to the business end - the SOYO COMBO Feature screen.
Pretty much everything that an over-clocker would want is found here. I like the fact that all the voltages are able to be manipulated from one main screen. System Performance can be set to Normal, Fast, Turbo. The different settings have the effect of applying different pre-defined settings to the crucial parameters of memory and clock setting.
FSB is adjustable in 1MHz increments from the standard 100MHz to a rather lofty 255MHz. I doubt the Northbridge would cope with the latter, but it's nice to see it available. As with almost every i845PE-based motherboard that I've tested, the ability to lock the sensitive AGP/PCI busses is available. You can also manually set it up to 80MHz/40MHz in 2MHz increments. So far so good.
The DDR333 (166MHz) memory option presents itself only if you choose a 533FSB processor (133FSB). We don't see any unofficial support for faster types of memory, unfortunately. Intel never were one to push out the specification boat. The timings, however, are about as strict as you would like. You'll need decent RAM to run at the timings highlighted above. Luckily, we had plenty of super-fast RAM on hand for testing.
I've shown the highest voltages available to the CPU, memory, and AGP respectively. I'd have liked a shade more on the memory but they're generally good. I like the fact that the Vcore goes all the way down to 1.1v. The lower voltages are perfect if you want to dabble in passive or uber-quiet cooling. Lastly, both the IDE RAID and on-board audio functions can be toggled on/off here.
I've included this shot to show that the board does undervolt a little bit. Under moderate BIOS load and with a 1.525v default 2.8GHz CPU, we see the VCore voltage waver from 1.45 - 1.47v. The temperatures, though, are exactly where I would expect them to be. A good BIOS.