- The Good: Socket 478 ATX motherboard handles Pentium 4 chips including the Prescott series; supports Dual Channel DDR memory; wealth of features, particularly for storage; ships with full selection of cables and a memory card reader; good performance; lots of overclocking options; black finish looks good in computers with a case window and internal lighting.
- The Bad: Location of power connectors can interfere with drive placement in some computer cases; IDE ports are low on the board and the provided cables are short, so they won't reach the uppermost optical drives in some mid-tower systems; had Windows XP conflict with one of the RAID controllers.
- The Verdict: An all-around good performer, with one of the most extensive arrays of storage connection options on the market - and you get a free memory card reader and a slew of cables as part of the package.
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REVIEW:
Motherboards are like car engines - their design, features and performance vary widely ... and many people don't have a clue exactly what's under the hood. For those in the know, though, Soyo has developed a motherboard with decent performance, overclocking capabilities and a truly awesome array of storage connections.
The Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 v1.0 Black Label motherboard gets its name from the black finish applied to the board itself. It's eye-catching in a computer case that's been modified with a side window and some internal lighting. But this finish isn't the only thing that marks it as a board for people who like to customize Windows or Linux PCs and who appreciate a high-performance machine.
First the important stuff. The ATX board supports both hyperthreaded Pentium 4 processors (including Prescott-series chips) and Celeron Socket 478 chips, and it has both 533 MHz and 800 MHz front side bus (FSB) support through its Intel i875P Canterwood chipset. I set the board up with a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz "e" model chip with an 800 MHz FSB, and it performed flawlessly.
The board also has four 184-pin double data rate (DDR) SDRAM DIMM slots, which can run in either standard or dual-channel memory mode - handling up to 4 gigabytes of either 400 MHz or 333 MHz ECC memory. I set it up with 1GB of Kingston ValueRAM for the review - that amount of memory helped the system take advantage of the CPU's multithreading capability and meant I could run a bunch of tasks simultaneously without bogging things down noticeably.
I personally don't like playing benchmark numbers games, because slight configuration changes can slew benchmark results dramatically - and the numbers are largely meaningless to the average user anyway. What counts is whether a system does the jobs you want to do, and handles them smoothly. Suffice it to say that with the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Prescott chip and 1GB of dual-channel Kingston error-checking RAM, the test machine with the Soyo board was noticeably faster than a similarly configured 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 with a 533 MHz front side bus and straight DDR memory. The difference was especially noticeable when rendering video and playing games at high resolutions and frame rates, and when I was using the system as a media server to send out several video and audio streams in the background while handling other tasks on-screen such as Web browsing. The machine handled the load without a quiver.
While it can be set up for just about anything, the board was obviously developed with overclockers (ie. high-end gamers) in mind. It has a flexible Award ACPI BIOS and built-in sensors to monitor voltage on the 3.3-volt and 12-volt lines, as well as the VCore, memory and AGP voltage variables. The AGP and memory voltage can be stepped up and down in 0.1-volt jumps for tweaking video card and overall system performance, and the processor's core voltage can be adjusted in 0.05-volt jumps.
The Dragon 2 can monitor the CPU fan speed and temperature, which is pretty standard on high-performance and even some entry-level motherboards these days. But what isn't standard is the huge heat sink on the chipset (specifically the Intel northbridge) to compensate for overclocking, and the low-heat design that features a four-phase voltage regulator. And the processor's front-side bus, core voltage and clock multiplier can all be rejigged in the BIOS, as I mentioned, without any need to fool around with motherboard jumper settings (although you'll have to use a jumper to reset the CMOS settings if you mess something up badly). Strangely, though, you'll have to keep a close eye on variables such as heat and voltage yourself, at least until Soyo updates its drivers - I couldn't find any way to set alarms to go off if readings went beyond my desired parameters, which is a major oversight.
The board has excellent internal and external expansion options. Internally, there are two pairs of IEEE 1394 (Firewire) and USB 2.0 motherboard connectors, an infrared riser, and a whopping array of five 32-bit bus mastering PCI slots.
You can use one of those slots to add a high-end audio card that reduces processor overhead slightly, but the Dragon 2's built-in audio is no slouch. The board has a CMI 8738 audio chip that can generate six-channel audio. And for audiophiles and those with high-end portable audio players, the Dragon 2 has provisions for both optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors through a small adapter card (included) that screws into a standard PCI card opening on the back of the PC.
The Dragon 2 also comes with a media card reader that fits into either a floppy drive bay or a full-size 5.25-inch CD-ROM bay (using the bundled bay adapter). Besides a Firewire port and four USB 2.0 ports on the back of the PC, the Dragon 2 package puts another Firewire port on the front of the media reader. The reader has four other slots that read nine types of removable memory cards, including Compact Flash, Smart Media and SD cartridges.
The board itself also has some legacy connectors, including a pair of RS-232 serial ports and a parallel printer port. It also has the standard PS/2 connectors for a mouse and keyboard. The built-in Ethernet jack offers 10/100 Mbps capability now, and Soyo says it supports gigabit ethernet for future expandability (but I wasn't set up to test this feature, unfortunately).
There's a heck of a lot packed onto this board, but there's one glaring problem I ran into with the design that may affect particular computer cases. The AT power connector is on the right-hand edge of the board about half-way down, and the power coupling plugs straight into the face of the board instead of coming out to one side. On my standard ATX case, this put it up hard against the back of the CD/DVD-ROM drive bays - with the plastic connector and protruding wires preventing me from putting drives into the lower two bays of my four-bay mid-tower (since the drives tend to stick into the case a bit past the rear of the open bay housings). I've never run into this problem with other motherboards on that particular case, which I often use for testing, so would-be integrators should check the rear clearance on the back of their drive bays before investing in this board if they plan to use all their bays.
On the graphics side, the board supports AGP cards running in 4X or 8X mode (no word whether Soyo has a PCI Express version in the works). Basically, add a video card, RAM and a hard drive, and this board is ready to go - or use the expansion ports to build a killer machine loaded with peripherals.
Oh yes, expansion options. The general specs and performance will please hobbyists and overclockers alike, but the SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 really breathes fire over the competition when it comes to storage.
The card has four independent IDE channels and four more serial ATA channels. Yup, that's not a typo - four SATA ports and four UltraDMA (66/100/133) eIDE ports supporting up to PIO Mode 5. This means you can add a combined total of 12 high performance hard disks and optical drives to this motherboard - phenomenal. And a nice touch: The board comes with three 80-wire IDE cables (an odd number...) and four SATA cables.
That's only the beginning. The I/O controller is one of the most incredible chips I've ever seen on a PC motherboard. You can run various RAID combinations (modes 0 and 1) on the SATA drives, and set up the two of the eIDE channels for IDE-RAID as well (ATA133 IDE- RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1). And you can have different RAID options running on your eIDE and SATA drives at the same time.
I say "can" with some reservations, though. I encountered a major driver conflict when trying to install the SATA RAID drivers on the motherboard under Windows XP Professional. The drivers installed fine, but up on reboot the computer would hang and refuse to boot past the initial Windows logo screen. Disabling the drivers again fixed the problem. As a result, I couldn't test the SATA features. I'm hoping it's something Soyo will address in a driver patch.
The motherboard driver disc ships with a couple of easy-to-use utility packages for configuring and managing RAID drives, though, along with demo version of Norton Anti-Virus and several Windows utilities.
While the software worked smoothly, I hit some bumps again when it came to the board layout and physically hooking up drives. Like the power connector, there was a design issue with the placement of the IDE sockets and drive housings in my ATX case. The IDE sockets are located near the bottom right-hand edge of the board, and the cables Soyo supplies are quite short. I couldn't put drives in the two lower CD/DVD-ROM bays due to the aforementioned power connector placement. But when I put my CD-ROM and CD-RW into the uppermost bays, the cables would only reach the connector on the drive located second from the top. This effectively gave me just one usable five-and-a-quarter-inch optical drive bay in my standard four-bay ATX mid-tower case until I could run out and buy a longer IDE cable to make use of the top bay. Not a show-stopper, but still rather annoying.
On the positive side, all the connectors are colour-coded to match up with the cables supplied with the board. The board also has understandable English keyword descriptions beside each port and connector, rather than cryptic alpha-numeric codes. (Incidentally, the colour-coding also applies to Soyo's Raptor SY-PS400 power supply, which I used in this review, making integration a snap.) The manual provides all the basics you'll need for installation and overclocking.
The board also has fan-controller hookups along each edge, so you can install several energy-saving variable-speed case fans to keep everything cool. The DIMM slots trail fairly low on the right-hand side of the board, but should be out of the way of all but the longest graphics and PCI cards. The CPU slot is also mounted well above the graphics card and under the power supply fan, where it's easy to get at and will get good airflow. It's also close to the back of the case, which makes mounting a custom CPU fan hood easier - a hood without extra ducting should work fine.
It's an unusual board, in that it should please both overclockers and people with heavy media-serving and storage needs. In short, whether you're building a high-end gaming machine, or a media server that needs a ton of storage to handle digital photos, music and video files, the Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 v1.0 Black Label motherboard is an excellent choice. Aside from the placement of the ATX power connector, it gets top marks all around.