The BIOS

The Soyo Dragon2 Platinum carries the Pheonix AwardBOIS.  It features an excellent Soyo Combo Menu designed to make overclocking a simple task.  While some avid overclockers may find its features rather "lacking", it makes up for it with its excellent stability and allows even the novice user to successfully overclock their system.  We will look at the Soyo Combo Menu in detail in a bit.  The Advanced BIOS menu features some familiar options such as the ability to enable/disable Hyper-Threading as well as make changes to your security options.  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.

The Advanced Chipset Features menu allows you to adjust your AGP aperature size as well as some additional Video options.  Power Management offers other familiar options such as your suspend and wake options.

**click to enlarge**

The PC Health Status menu displays your CPU VCore, DRAM and AGP voltages as well as your temps and fan speeds.  The only negative comments I will make on the Soyo Dragon2 BIOS is the failure to include alarms or temp triggered shutdowns.  This is something a majority of users look for and pay close attention to.  I was quite surprised not to find them.

Soyo Combo Menu

The Soyo Combo menu is where you'll spend the most time playing with.  It features just about all the frequently used settings an overclocker uses.  Advanced DRAM control allows you to tweak your memory.  The Onboard Device menu allows you to enable/disable the onboard features of the Dragon 2 motherboard. 

The OnChip IDE and Boot Device menus feature your storage options which allows you to make appropriate changes based on the interface of your installed hard drives.  Now that we here, I would like to point out that the only installation issue we encountered with the board was when we attempted to change mode to IDE + SATA using an older unreleased BIOS that came with our review sample.  Once we installed the latest BIOS from the Soyo website, the system was able to POST in IDE + SATA mode. 

Overclocking

Before we go and show you its overclocking ability, let's take a look at some of the options in the BIOS.

We thought our recently reviewed Abit IC7-G had outrageously high maximum FSB settings, but the Soyo Dragon 2 actually offers even higher settings.  FSB can be increased to a whopping 511!  Unfortunately, the highest CPU VCore setting available on the Dragon 2 is only 1.6.  Although this board is extremely stable at this setting, higher settings would be nice in order to really determine its overclocking potential.  Hopefully, Soyo will release a BIOS update that will offer higher options.  You are able to run your AGP/PCI clock speeds at a fixed rate of 66/33, which you'll want to do if you are overclocking.  DRAM:CPU Ratios available are 1.33, 1.25 and 0.8.  Your DDR voltage can be increased to a maximum of 2.9V and your AGP voltage to a max of 1.8V.

The Soyo Dragon 2 is not only the first Canterwood motherboard we've tested that allowed us to run our Corsair TwinX1024 at DDR500, but it is also the first board that offers you extremely easy, trouble free overclocking while maintaining the highest level of stability.   In all honesty, this motherboard excels in this category. 

As with all our motherboard reviews, we like to determine its 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.

The Soyo Dragon 2 Platinum allowed us to run our system at 250FSB using stock Intel cooling.  This means that our Intel 2.8GHz 800FSB processor was able to run completely stable at 3.5GHz using stock cooling.  Very impressive indeed!  250FSB was the absolute limit for this motherboard using the current BIOS and stock cooling.  Anything above this was simply not stable.

These results speak for themselves in our performance tests!

Next: Performance Tests