SOYO Puts Out New AMD and Intel Motherboards

No slouch in Taiwan, SOYO Computer is looking to become a big player in Europe. The company just let us know that it has centralized its European operations in an attempt to promote more aggressive growth and to seek new distribution sources throughout Europe. SOYO Deutschland, GmbH, will now serve all of its customers throughout Europe with sales, credit/order processing, warehousing and technical support services. SOYO is now also seeking new distribution channels and partnerships for its products and services. As part of the big Euro push, SOYO also announced a family of new AMD and Intel-based motherboards for the European market. New motherboards for AMD CPUs include the SY-K7ADA, SY-K7VTA-PRO, and SY-K7 DRAGON. SOYO's SY-K7ADA is designed for AMD's Socket A Duron/Thunderbird CPUs and features Acer Laboratories Inc.'s (Ali) ALiMAGiK chipset, supports a 200MHz or 266MHz system bus, and is compatible with DDR SDRAM (Note: THG reviewed the K7ADA

back in May). The new SY-K7VTA-PRO features the VIA KT133 chipset, and 200MHz system interface. In July, SOYO will release the SY-K7V DRAGON motherboard for AMD Thunderbird and Duron CPUs with VIA's KT266 chipset. Because the world genuinely needs more cute acronyms, SOYO says the board's name defines features. The "D" in DRAGON stands for DDR memory support, R is for RAID (0,1) on board, A is for Audio on board, G = AGP Pro Slot; O tells of its Overclocking features (adjustable via the BIOS), and N = NIC 10/100 Ethernet onboard. All we need is a little song. For Intel fans, SOYO is offering the SY-TISU, which supports FC-PGA 2 Tualatin CPUs. The board features Intel's 815EP chipset and uses standard SDRAM 168-pin DIMM sockets for up to 512MB of memory. This fall, SOYO says it will announce its Intel Pentium 4 motherboard in conjunction with the formal release of Intel's Brookdale i845 chipset. SOYO's SY-P4ISR will support Intel's new Socket-478 Pentium 4 CPU with 400 MHz FSB. The board will feature three 168-pin SDRAM 3.3V DIMM sockets with support up to 3GB. Because some of the boards seem to have already been released, we figure that they must be freshly available in the European market. Not new to some, but new to you. That's how we feel here in the states when things are released in Asia or Europe before we get them here. How dare Nintendo not give us first dibs on Game Boy Advance.