Setup and Overclocking
The driver setup proved to be very difficult and temperamental at first. I already had a fairly fresh Win98 install on the drive and cleaned out the old drivers. Problems, problems, problems; none of this was Soyo’s fault but simply my stubbornness about formatting and starting with a fresh install. Once I decided to do the fresh install things went fairly smoothly and the driver installation was not very troublesome. I must recommend when making a change as drastic as a main board you start with a fresh install. It is the best and safest method. Even after installing fresh I did have slight driver problems when using the drivers off of the Soyo CD. The newest VIA 4in1’s cleaned things up and everything went without a hitch from there on out. After playing with the drivers for quite some time I would say the AGP drivers are the absolute must have. The others are less beneficial but do not skip the AGP unless you want to waste 8-10 fps in Q3A.The setup would have gone much smoother if I had performed it again since this is the first VIA board I have used. Once starting from scratch the setup was not very time consuming and a bare drive went to full functionality in 1 hour and 15 minutes with all drivers and ready to load up Q3. I am sure that is slow for some people but it was much less time then I had spent trying to adapt my existing installation to the new hardware.
Overclocking: I was slightly disappointed in the maximum speed of the 550E that was achieved on this board. Maximum speed at default voltage was 781MHz and with voltage tweaks it was stable at 798MHz. This was a respectable overclock but the processor had previously been stable at 814MHz on a BX motherboard with standard voltage. While the maximum speed of processor in MHz was not superior as I had hoped it might be, the AGP bus speed was much closer to specification. A Creative Labs Annihilator Pro was used and has proven to be tolerable of bus speeds up to 99MHz. By running on the SY-7VCA at a mere 72.5MHz the overclocking of the video subsystem was improved greatly. Also the effects of long-term high bus speeds have not been proven or disproved on the video card itself. The performance of those extra 16MHz will not be noticeable in real world feel, and are primarily for bragging rights.
