Introduction

The P4S Dragon

Going back to the basics

It’s been awhile since we’ve evaluated a Soyo motherboard but the company certainly hasn’t gone away. The last Soyo board we officially reviewed, the 6BA+IV was one of the best 2nd-generation BX motherboards, its HighPoint RAID controller and jumperless configuration appealed to the enthusiast market, a segment Soyo was building solid ground with. In much the same way as ABIT has built a name for itself in the overclocking community with its SoftMenu BIOS and excellent feature set, Soyo was aiming for similar success.

However as motherboard design evolved and the tastes and preferences of consumers changed, Soyo was slow to adapt, and as a result its boards fell out of grace with hardware enthusiasts. Instead of implementing more advanced BIOS interfaces and feature sets, Soyo’s motherboards seemed to appeal to the OEM segment. Then, towards the latter half of 2001, everything changed. Overclocking became a concern again as Soyo implemented 1MHz bus speed adjustments in the BIOS of some of its motherboards. Soyo was essentially getting back to the basics that made it such a popular name among the overclocking crowd. However, things in the market have changed quite a bit in the past two years, while ABIT is still well respected in the overclocking segment, Epox has begun to establish itself as a worthy competitor. Does Soyo have what it takes to reenter this competitive market? We’ll be examining how the P4S Dragon stacks up to its competitors but first lets take a closer look at the board itself.

Purple PCI slots!

Onboard networking

Based on the SiS 645 chipset, the P4S Dragon blends the features normally found in an enthusiasts’ board with the cost of a more mainstream product. Or at least that was Soyo’s plan when developing the P4S Dragon. Thanks to the SiS 645 chipset, the P4S Dragon supports DDR200, DDR266, and DDR333 all in the same package. The chipset also natively supports six bus mastered PCI slots and up to 3GB of memory. Normally a chipset packed with so many features commands a higher price tag, but SiS is actually pricing the 645 chipset to move. As a result, motherboard manufacturers such as Soyo are charging less for their SiS 645 products than their equivalent products based on Intel’s 845 chipset.

Soyo P4S Dragon
Chipset	SiS 645
Memory	3 184-pin DIMM sockets (supports up to 3GB)
Drive Controllers	1 FDD, 2 ATA33/66/100 Channels, 2 ATA133 RAID channels
Slots	1 AGP, 6 PCI slots
Bus Speeds	100-255MHz in 1MHz increments
USB	1 USB 1.1 Controller supporting 6 ports, external USB 2.0 controller (4 ports)