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The BIOS
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The
Soyo Dragon Plus carries the Pheonix AwardBIOS. Like a majority of
current Soyo motherboards, it features an excellent Soyo Combo Menu designed
to make overclocking a simple task. From here, you can make adjustments
to your CPU, memory and video as well as your voltages to increase stability
when overclocking.
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The
Advanced BIOS Menu allows access to your security options as well as other
commonly used features such as floppy seek and num lock status. From
here, you can also indicate whether or not you would like the boot process to
show the Soyo Logo in full screen or show the POST details.
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The
Integrated Peripherals Menu mainly gives access to your storage options.
Your onchip USB ports can be enabled via this screen. The Power
Management menu simply allows you to define or adjust any of the power related
features.
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The
CPU temp on the PC Health Status Menu was not monitoring the CPU temperature
accurately. The temp sensor reported 65șC which seemed quite
high considering the heatsink was fairly cold to the touch. We used
other methods to monitor its temperature to confirm that it was indeed inaccurate.
Like our recently reviewed Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum, the BIOS on the Dragon Plus
lacks any alarm features or temp triggered shutdowns. This is a rather
important feature for most users and like the Soyo Dragon 2, we were quite
surprised not to find them.
Overclocking
Before we go and show you its maximum overclocking ability, let's take a look at some
of the O/C options in the BIOS.
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All
your overclocking needs are met via the excellent, user friendly Soyo Combo
Menu. System Performance can be set to Normal, Fast or Turbo. We
were easily able to run in Turbo mode using quality RAM. FSB can be set
between 200-250. The AGP can be adjusted to a whopping 100MHz however,
if you are attempting to achieve the highest overclock, it is best to leave it
at its default speed of 66MHz. Unlike the Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum, The
CPU VCore can be brought up a bit higher to 1.7V. AGP Voltages range
between 1.5V-1.8V. DDR Voltage can be brought up to a maximum of 2.9V.
Finally, there is a CK8 Voltage option which I'm not entirely sure what its
purpose is except for added stability. The DRAM Configuration Menu
allows you to further tweak your memory.
As
with all our motherboard reviews, we like to provide you with the highest
possible stable overclock. To determine stability, we run 10 cycle's
of Sandra's Burn-In wizard as well as run the system under normal operation
for an extensive period of time.
We were able to bump up the FSB up to a maximum
of 215FSB while maintaining 100% stable operation bringing our AMD64 3200+ up
to 2.2GHz. That's equivalent to the speed of the recently released AMD64
3400+. These results were achieved using stock cooling.
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