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Introduction.The past couple of years have been a relatively quiet time for Taiwanese chipset manufacturer Acer Labs Inc (Ali), with it’s only major market contribution being the somewhat patchy Super Socket 7 compatible, Aladdin 5. ALi also released a rather interesting Super Socket 7 chipset in early 2000 which featured an integrated graphics controller from ArtX who were also working on the graphics processor found in the Nintendo GameCube. Unfortunately this chipset needed to be paired with the AMD K6 III for best performance and was released just as AMD announced that they were stopping production of this chip. ALi only released their first Athlon compatible chipset in 2001 in the form of the MAGiK 1. This quickly gained a reputation for being a rather good chipset with performance better than that of the VIA KT266 and reliability far in excess of what was seen with the Aladdin 5. From initial production of boards by Taiwanese manufacturer Iwill, the MAGiK 1 became incorporated in boards from the likes of Asus and Soyo. Since the launch of the MAGiK 1, there have been at least three revisions of this chipset aimed at eradicating any problems as well as minor tweaks to enhance performance. The SY-K7ADA is Soyo’s first Socket A board based upon an ALi chipset and is aimed at the mainstream Athlon and Duron market. It would be a mistake to compare this board directly to the Epox EP-8KHA+, Abit TH7-RAID or even Soyo’s own SY-K7 DRAGON, as these are all targetted at the high-end PC enthusiast. In fairness the SY-K7ADA is closer in market appeal to the Chaintech CT-7VJDA than to the high-end boards we just mentioned. In fact we found the SY-K7ADA a very interesting board to review and in many respects we were pleasantly surprised by many of our findings. We hope you find this review as enjoyable to read as we found this board to review. To see how the SY-K7ADA fared, read on... VIA KT266.The SY-K7ADA is based upon the ALi MAGiK1 chipset. Like the VIA KT266A, the MAGiK1 is a Socket A, DDR SDRAM compatible chipset. The NorthBridge controller is the ALi M1647, which features support for AGP 4X and up to 3 GB of PC-2100 DDR SDRAM.
The SouthBridge controller is the ALi M1535D+ which features support for ATA-100 hard drives as well as a now standard AC-97 Audio Codec.
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