Soyo P4I875P Dragon 2 Platinum Edition

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
Soyo
Aug. 22, 2003

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Integrated 6 Channel Sound

Unlike most motherboards with integrated sound, the sound on the Dragon 2 PE is actually quite nice. The quality is better than that of a SB Live! and it supports 5.1 surround sound speakers, DLS wave table music, optical and coaxial digital in/out. The onboard sound supports DS3D and A3D, but no EAX.

ATA & SATA RAID

The Highpoint ATA chip on the Soyo is based on the HighPoint 372 Lite Controller, which supports ATA133 disks in either RAID 0 (Striping) or RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0+1 (Striping and Mirroring). The SATA RAID chip is the Silicon Image's Sil3112A controller and allows RAID 0 and 1 modes. The Silicon Image controller supports Serial ATA 1.0 compliant devices which allows up to 1.5Gbps (150MB/s) transfer speeds.

Onboard Gigabit Ethernet

One thing I must have in a motherboard is onboard Ethernet. The Dragon 2 PE has onboard Gigabit Ethernet which supports CSA, the latest bus enhancements on the new Canterwood and Springdale boards.

Extras

Soyo included many extras with the Dragon 2 PE. For use with the Multiple ATA and SATA setups, Soyo has included 3 IDE cables (supporting two drives each), a floppy cable and four SATA cables, but there were no SATA power cables. Most SATA drives and some of the newer Power Supplies ship with SATA power cables, so this isn't that big of a deal.

The Dragon 2 PE also includes their Sigma Box, a 6-1 card reader that can mount in a 3.5" or a 5.25" bay. The Sigma Box also has USB and Firewire ports located on the front of it. This version of the Sigma Box may not work with other motherboards.

Soyo also included a bundle of software with the Dragon 2 PE. The suite includes Norton's latest Antivirus, Ghost, Personal Firewall, Adobe ActiveShare, Acrobat Reader, and eBook Reader. The software will not work with non-Soyo motherboards. Popping the CD in on my DFI NF2 board proved it with an "Illegal User" error.

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Page 3 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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