PC Chips boards were fine too for the most part. The shop I worked at back then used to sell tons of budget machines with PC Chips boards with very few failures. Trick was to not use the cheapest possible PSU's.

effy wrote on 2021-02-27, 15:02:

PC Chips boards were fine too for the most part. The shop I worked at back then used to sell tons of budget machines with PC Chips boards with very few failures. Trick was to not use the cheapest possible PSU's.

There were some decent boards, but all had wafer-thin PCB, cheapest possible specs of VRMs and then there was that well-documented fake cache thing, complete with modded (and soldered) BIOS to cover it up.

They *could* work, and indeed a good PSU helps any board's stability, but PC Chips were the lowest of the low, both in terms of build quality and business ethics.

PARKE wrote on 2021-02-27, 12:11:

Looks like a great board. The (only) difference is described on page 2 of the manual:soyo.JPG

The problem is, there are 3 versions of them 5EH5, 5EH a 5EHM. In anadtech review, there is mentioned 1024kb L2 cache as optional (with red) also by 5EH5.
So are SY-5EH5 and SY-5EH same boards?

The available info suggests that the 'SY-5EH' comes in two versions, not 3.
The '5' with 512Kb cache and the 'M' with 1 Mb cache.

BLockOUT wrote on 2017-12-03, 14:13:

Is soyo a good brand for old motherboard or it is bad quality as PCCHIPS? I have 2 motherboards that are soyo and i saw that man […]
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Is soyo a good brand for old motherboard or it is bad quality as PCCHIPS?
I have 2 motherboards that are soyo and i saw that many capacitors are in very bad shape on both of them some orange on the top, Strangely the motherboard still works.

Motherboard Soyo pentium3 : SY-7VBA133U (universal AGP)
Motherboard Soyo Super socket7 : SY-5EHM

There company is dead, their site is gone, nobody ever made a backup of their drivers. I saw a review on linustechtips on the pentium3 one and i saw it came with a soyo cd manual / drivers rev 20030902 . But i was not able to find a copy of that CD anywhere, nor CD for the 5EHM either. I was really hoping on getting a copy of those CDs to see how it was, how it looked like and what came inside.

Does anyone have those driver CDs? maybe you can upload a copy to megaupload or vogon drivers?

maybe newer revisions of the driver disc have drivers for other motherboard models? I have an older revision soyo driver disc but it does not come with the motherboard driver.

Here's the site they rebranded https://www.maxsun.com/

effy wrote on 2021-02-27, 15:02:

PC Chips boards were fine too for the most part. The shop I worked at back then used to sell tons of budget machines with PC Chips boards with very few failures. Trick was to not use the cheapest possible PSU's.

Both ironically and unironically, some of their boards managed to tame Windows ME's buggyness.

I have the M726MRT, w/ both Slot 1 and 370 (370 only up to Mendocino IIRC, not sure why considering there is the pinmod for Coppermine operation), ALi Aladdin Pro II chipset (which I found to be really solid actually - just don't use PCChips' craptacularly bad drivers.). Soundchip is surprisingly a genuine CMI 8738 on mine (and I still have the audio bracket from a M577, oh boi) and from what small period I had used it (around a month or two), ME ran surprisingly stable - any other machines would tend to barf at the sight of Milennium - the M726MRT just pushed along.