The board comes in Soyo’s usual black and purple scheme, which I happen to like quite a bit. Overall Soyo did a pretty good job with the layout. The main ATX power connector is on the right, keeping it out of the way of the HSF. The primary and secondary IDE are mounted in an unusual fashion, one above the other instead of next to each other as on most boards. I like this design, as it makes pulling one of the cables a lot easier than when they are all in the same place.
Below the two main IDE controllers are a single SATA controller powered by a Marvell 88i8030 bridge and a third IDE controller powered by a Highpoint ATA133 HPT371, which are capable of Raid 0 or 1, but not both. They are mounted in between PCI slot 4 and 5 and 5 and 6, and most likely won’t pose a problem for full-length PCI cards. The USB 2.0 headers are at the bottom of the board, which is nice because it keeps the bracket wires out of the way. For some reason many boards have them in weird places, such as under the AGP slot, which I assume would render them useless with a Geforce FX installed.
This board suffers the same fate as most with 6 PCI slots, making removal of ram with the video card installed a very tough proposition. I was able to pull it off this time, with about 1mm to spare. I do like the sliding AGP retention mechanism, which in my opinion is easier to use and more substantial than the flimsy little clip on most boards. It was also nice to see the passive chipset heatsink.
