SOYO SY-7IZB motherboard - 21/10/99
by: Henrik Jersling

Design:

The design of this board differs a bit from other AT motherboards, usually the socket is positioned bottom right but as you can see on this motherboard they have positioned it where the SLOT, socket is positioned on the ATX boards. In my EFA Discovery ZX review I pointed out that the COM, LPT and diskdrive connectors sit tight together so it’s hard to put the cables in place. On this board the have moved the diskdrive connector to the other side of the board so that it sits next to the IDE connectors. That makes it a bit easier to put the cables in place.

As you can see on the picture the board has a 1/4/1 slot-setup (1 ISA, 4 PCI, 1 AGP slots). I see this board as an upgrade board and because of that I think that 1 ISA slot is at least one too few. 4 PCI slots are pretty good but because you only have 1 ISA slot and the ISA and the lowest PCI slot is shared you only have 3 free PCI slots if you are using an ISA card. That can be a bit to few for some people.

This board has 3 DIMM sockets which is pretty good even if the ZX chipset only supports 4 memory rows (2 double-sided DIMMs). If you have some older memory you might have single-sided DIMMs then you can use all 3 sockets.

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