Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 Canterwood

Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 Canterwood

Motherboard Review

by Ramil Tranquilino

June 02, 2003

 

 

Manufactured by: Soyo

Supplied by: Soyo

 

 

Introduction

The introduction of Intel's i875P chipset aka Canterwood has brought the desktop Pentium 4 platform into a new level.  New technologies like 800mhz FSB, Hyperthreading, Dual Channel DDR400, PAT, and SATA Raid has clearly made this chipset the most complete and powerful to date.

 

With every motherboard manufacturer coming out with their own i875P implementation, the market will be flooded with so many Canterwood based boards to choose from. So which do you choose? Which board gets to be your i875P board of choice?

 

Soyo is one such manufacturer not to be left out. They have released 2 motherboards based on the i875P chipset and called it their Dragon 2 series. There is the Black Edition and the second is the Platinum Edition. They are basically the same in terms of features except for the Gigabit LAN which is absent in the Black Edition. The obvious difference is the PCB's color which is where they based their naming. Today we will  find out if Soyo has what it takes to take a piece of the i875P market. Introducing Soyo's Canterwood offering, the SY-P4I865PE Plus DRAGON 2 Black Edition.

 

 

Soyo SY-P4I875P DRAGON 2 Black Edition

Soyo Group is pretty much new in the motherboard market. Established in the heart of the Silicon Valley in 1999, they started providing computer and networking products and soon became America's leading manufacturer, wholesaler and provider of such products. Although quite new, they have produced quite a few motherboards out of every high performance chipset that came out be it Intel or AMD. Most of you will probably know their Dragon series of motherboards.

 

Now they have a new series of motherboard which promises to pack in more performance and features than ever, the Dragon 2 series.

 

D: Dual Channel DDR400/333 with ECC
R: New Serial ATA / ATA-133 RAID
A: Crisp 6-Channel Hardware Audio With All Digital SPDIF Connector
G: Extreme 8X AGP Support
O: Flexible Overclocking Options
N: 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. Internet Ready
2: Next Generation Dual DDR, Dual High Speed I/O (USB 2.0/Firewire)

 

The Soyo SY-P4I875P is the first in this line. So we expect that Soyo has placed a lot of time and effort in this initial offering for their Dragon 2 series.  Today we will see if this board will be the standard of all Dragon 2 series boards to come.  Let's find out shall we?