A great motherboard! (Soyo SY-5EHM)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Soyo SY-5EHM
Date:	14/08/00 (2903 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Supports wide variety of chips, price, Cheap

Disadvantages: Old, Hard to get hold of, Obselete

Even though, most of you who would be interested in things like upgrading your motherboard are already familiar with the jargon involved, I'll try and explain everything in clear English.

I bought my SOYO 5EHM about 18 months ago, and it's been sitting quite nicely inside my computer, doing whatever is asked of it. But, it's only recently now that I've been considering upgrading my processor from AMD K6-2 300Mhz to something cheap, but meatier, that I've realised what a good mainboard the 5EHM is.

The Soyo 5EHM is an AT motherboard (referring to it's size and shape) for Super Socket 7 processors (shape of processor which usually means Intel Pentium Processor (90-233 MHz)
Cyrix 6x86 (PR 150-266), and 6x86 MX and MII, AMD K5 (PR 100-166), K6 (166-300 MHz) and K6-2 (266-400 MHz) and AMD K6-3 processors), and for your money, what you'll pull out of the box is this: the motherboard itself, a quick start guide, the obligatory installation CDROM, one IDE cable (for attaching your hard drive to your motherboard ? but if you are upgrading your motherboard, you'll probably already have one of these), one floppy drive cable (again, you probably already have one of these), a 9 pin serial / PS/2 connector and a 25 pin parallel / 9 pin serial connector. Basically, everything you need (apart from USB) to plug your peripherals into your computer.

The motherboard uses the ETEQ chipset to run the functions and the Award plug 'n' Play BIOS to set everything up. Unlike some other motherboard / BIOS set-ups, the Soyo still uses jumpers for setting values (e.g. processor speeds), so a bit of fiddling with settings is required before you get the thing up and running, but everything is explained well in the startup guide (and manual if you ever get it printed off the CD or Soyo web site).

I have the original 1.0 model, but later models support faster chips. I think these more recent versions are capable of go
ing up to 500Mhz for K6-2, 450Mhz for K6-3, and 550Mhz for Intel Celeron processors.

They
have an AGP slot, 3 PCI slots, and 3 ISA slots, with one being shared (i.e. in total you get 5 expansion slots). There is a connection on the board for plugging in a USB port set (if not included with more recent revisions, then is available in good retailers for about £10), and it's also capable of taking SIMMs or DIMMs (different types of memory).

The 5EHM has a 1Mb cache, and is capable of running at bus speeds of 66Mhz 100Mhz, depending on your memory speed.

These specs are excellent for a rather cheap motherboard (it's nearing the end of it's days due to the scarcity of the processors it supports ? the AMD K6-3 is no longer available). The support on the SOYO web site is excellent - lots of updates for drivers, BIOS etc. with detailed instructions on how to perform these upgrades. Newer versions of the manual can also be found on the web site, in Acrobat format.

As I've said, I've been the owner of one of these for a while now, and it must be fairly robust, because over the course of the last year or so, I've upgraded a lot of the components inside my computer. This means that I've been repeatedly plugging and unplugging stuff into the motherboard, changing jumper settings, upgrading the BIOS etc. all without any trouble at all. I've had exactly one problem in all this time when I installed new AGP drivers when I bought an AGP graphics card about 12 months ago, but I assume it was down to the drivers as opposed to the motherboard, and was fixed fairly quickly.

Also: any time I've had to deal with SOYO customer service, they have been fairly prompt, and they've ALWAYS solved any problem that I've had. The web site at www.soyo.nl is excellent, easy to navigate, and well laid out. I would advise anyone with a Soyo motherboard of any type to have a look here for updated manuals, B
IOS flashes, drivers etc.

Summary: