Soyo P4I875P Dragon 2 Platinum Edition

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
Soyo
Aug. 22, 2003

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Layout

The main visual difference between the Dragon 2 and the Dragon 2 Platinum Edition is the Silver/Gray PCB. While the Silver PCB may look spiffy, the color coded slots in purple, yellow, and green may not be everyone's favorites. The color coded slots do make it easier to navigate the board while installing components though.

One thing I like about the P4's mounting mechanism is the ample room provided. The clip gives you plenty of space to work with, but the capacitors and Northbridge heatsink may get in the way while mounting a heatsink. I didn't have any problems during my experience with the board.

The Northbridge features a large passive heatsink that does its job quite well. This is a much better solution than the tiny heatsinks and annoying fans that some manufactures use.

Like most Canterwood boards, the Dragon 2 PE has four DIMM slots that support dual channel configurations.

There are five PCI slots and an AGP slot. The AGP has a nifty sliding lock to hold in the card. With all the integrated peripherals, who needs these PCI slots?

There are four IDE ports on the Dragon 2 PE. Two are for RAID operation which supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. There are also four SATA ports, two for RAID 0 and 1.

The I/O ports on the Dragon 2 PE are full of goodies. There are four USB ports, a Firewire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, analog output, line out and mic jacks, along with the usual PS/2 ports, two serial ports and a parallel port. Soyo also included more ports located on a PCI bracket. These ports include analog center and rear output channels, optical and coaxial digital input and output ports.

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Page 2 of 9

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout
Page 3: Features & Accessories
Page 4: BIOS
Page 5: Test Rig & Sandra CPU Benchmarks
Page 6: Sandra & Aida32 Memory Benchmarks
Page 7: ScienceMark & PCMark02 Benchmarks
Page 8: 3dMark01, 3DMark03, & GLMark Benchmarks
Page 9: Overclocking & Conclusion

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4 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on August 21, 2003 - 11:41 pm

feeding time is the best over @ Brian's house ;) ;)

2 - Posted by Rich on August 22, 2003 - 9:09 am

Who manufactures the Gigabit ethernet controller on that board?

3 - Posted by Brian on August 22, 2003 - 12:36 pm

Intel.

4 - Posted by Rich on August 22, 2003 - 12:48 pm

The reason I asked is because I have seen a lot of problems with Broadcom Gigabit controllers, especially with onboard Ethernet. Thanks for info :D

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