Board Layout & Features

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This a truly a beautiful motherboard and you'll want to show it off.  Soyo is the only manufacturer to offer these one of a kind motherboards featuring a highly attractive platinum or arctic silver PCB.  To compliment this design, Soyo opted for some really nice looking chrome capacitors that you'll find throughout the board. 

As with all other Canterwood motherboards, there are four DIMM slots supporting Dual Channel DDR memory modules.  The ATX power connector and floppy connector are nicely located on the far corner of the motherboard.  The auxiliary power, however, is located near the middle section directly behind two of the four rear USB ports. 

When it comes to storage options, the Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum Edition offers more than any board we have seen thanks to its total of three onboard controllers.  You have four IDE connectors, two of which support RAID via the Highpoint HPT372 controller.  You also have a total of four SATA connectors, two of which support RAID via the onboard Silicon Image Sil 3112 controller.  These would be SATA connectors 3 and 4.  Connectors 1 and 2 are controlled via the ICH5R Southbridge.  I would like to note that the latest firmware from Soyo adds RAID1 support to the ICH5R controller.  If you do the math, that is a total of 12 drives that can be installed on this board right out of the box.  Pretty impressive.  There are 5 purple colored PCI slots and the AGP slot has a nice slide out retention mechanism rather than those flakey flip type mechanisms that tend to break off over time.  The AGP slot was designed to support only 1.5V video cards.  You'll notice in the pictures provided that there is one large 5mm LED located directly above the AGP slot.  This diagnostic LED will light up if you attempt to install a 3.3V video card and the system will not power on.  On the far corner, you'll also find the additional Firewire and USB headers.  Above the PCI slots, you'll find the onboard CMI 8738 audio chip supporting 6-channel audio. 

There is no fan on the Northbridge but Soyo opted for a rather large and nice looking aluminum heatsink instead.   I prefer this over a smaller heatsink with a noisy fan, plus is adds to the overall design and cool looking arctic silver PCB.  There is a row of nice looking chrome capacitors located directly beside the P4 bracket.  The massive Northbridge heatsink also comes fairly close to touching the P4 bracket.  If you plan on installing another larger heatsink/fan, you should be OK as long as it is roughly the same dimensions as the P4 bracket itself.  One minor feature that is worth pointing out as well is that the bracket is held in place using screws rather than those annoying plastic push pins.  This makes it easier to switch between heatsinks and you're less likely to damage your bracket or motherboard while trying to remove them. 

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The rear I/O panel features a total of four USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire port, one Gigabit Ethernet LAN port and audio connectors with your output, line in and mic jacks.

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In addition to the audio jacks on the rear of the board, Soyo includes a audio PCI extender which includes your center and rear output channels and your SPDIF digital optical and coaxial inputs/outputs.

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Finally, I would like to look at the excellent 6-in-1 Sigma box that is included with this motherboard.  It has an integrated memory card reader that supports all flash cards including Smart Media, Multi Media (MMC), Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick (Sony) and Compact Flash cards type I and II.  This bay insert also features two additional USB ports and two Firewire ports.  One other very handy feature I would like to point out is the addition of a Clear CMOS button.   That's right!  No more going through the trouble of opening up your case after an unsuccessful overclock.  Hardcore overclockers will find this quite useful.

Bundled Software

The Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum includes an excellent 8-in-1 Super Bonus Pack CD that includes OEM versions of the following applications:

• Norton AntiVirus 2003

• Norton Ghost 2003

• Norton Personal Firewall 2003

• Adobe ActiveShare

Next: BIOS & Overclocking