SOYO Dragon Ultra – SIS 645 Mainboard

Well what can I Say? I adore Soyo and the boards they make. Though not as big a brand name as Asus, Gigabyte or MSI, Soyo has been in the market for a while now. And they have come up with some innovative solutions like an old 6BA100+ Board made by Soyo that I use for my back up machine when I am using me regular machine for testing purposes. What we have come to expect from Soyo is quality at an unbelievable price and let us not forget performance. Does the P4s Dragon Ultra hold the same for us …. Well we shall see

My first impression of the board was Very Good. The board looks stunning using the same color combination as the K7V Dragon Plus Purple on Black does look quite exotic! But hey who bought Motherboards based on good looks!

Keeping that Aside the Soyo P4s Dragon Ultra does offer a consumer a lot of options.

The Layout I say is pretty ordinary. I Would have liked if the line of capacitors around the Processor socket were a bit further away from the socket, since it gets in the way of any unconventional cooler that might be fitted to the Pentium 4 Hardcore overclokerz would probably not like that. But the socket accommodates any regular Pentium 4 Socket 478 Cooler without any problems

There are 3 184Pin 2.5V DDR Ram Slots onboard Supporting upto 3GB’s of Memory. Problem there is finding 3 1GB DIMM s to fit on to them! Again I would like to suggest to board makers to keep some distance between the first DIMM Slot and the CPU socket because larger than regular coolers tend to hinder with the Ram Slots if proper distance is not maintained in manufacture.

It Has a C Media Sound Chip Integrated into the Motherboard which supports 6 Channel Stereo sound. It also has optical output and an SPDIF Out Integrated into a special break away unit from the motherboard. Though this is No Creative Live! It comes close enough for me to Live with without my Live Gold!. The Sound quality is pretty good and hey Even the Live! Only Supports 4 Channel Stereo, this supports 6 Dolby Digital 5.1 Compliant sound. Onboard sound has come a long way to be nearly equivalent to a separate medium range sound card.

There is also an onboard LAN Adaptor present which means for persons who want to connect to a network again further expenditure is minimized.

The Board also has support for no less than 6 USB Adaptors which is a wonderful feature since more and more computer peripherals are now made with a USB interface which makes 2 USB adaptors hardly adequate. These USB adaptors also support the new USB 2.0 Standard.

The Board has 4 IDE Connectors all Supporting ATA 100. Two of these connectors are intended for the onboard DMA Controller that comes with the SiS 961 Chipset while the other is connected to the High Point Technologies RAID Controller. Though for home users there is no practical purpose of having a RAID Controller it is extremely valuable if you have mission critical data since RAID is the only Method of securing up to the minute data incase of Hardware Malfunction. The HPT Controller Supports Stripe Sets also knows as RAID Level 1 which can greatly increase Hard Disk performance but offers no security against data loss, and RAID level 1 Which is Mirroring, which supporting Mirroring the changes made on one disk onto another disk so in the even of one disk failing the data maybe recovered from the other disk. As you will understand this is a very useful tool and when you buy the Dragon Ultra you don’t have to spend extra paying for a RAID Controller.

The Board also features an AGP Pro slot which is commonly seen in a lot of high end boards these days. Though the AGP Pro slot does not serve any special purpose for the moment we expect to see the emergence of AGP Pro graphics cards soon into the Market. The Slot is AGP Ver 2.0 Compliant as well as supporting AGP 4X and Fast Writes and is also fully backward compatible with earlier versions of AGP.

Now lets put the board to the test and see how it reacts!