Motherboard manufacturer Soyo's high-end boards have always been packed with features and the latest version of the P4I875P Dragon 2, v1.0 is no exception. Soyo claims the new board supports Intel's new Prescott processor up to 3.4GHz, but we had an early example of the board which wouldn't support the new CPU past 2.8GHz; however, there shouldn't be any problems with the retail batch of boards.

Based - as the name suggests - around Intel's i875P (Canterwood) chipset and built on a full-size ATX PCB, the first thing you notice about the P4I875P Dragon 2 is just how packed the board is. Yet somehow all the components have room around them, apart from the usual problem with the memory slot locking latches and the AGP slot.

The Northbridge is passively cooled by a large aluminium heatsink, so there's no chance of noise from a badly behaving chipset fan. The four DIMM slots are colour-coded which helps newcomers put memory in the right slots to enable the Dual Channel memory function of the chipset; a maximum of 4GB of either DDR333 or DDR400 is supported.

If you are into RAID setups then the P4I875P Dragon 2 is well worth considering; not only is there a parallel RAID function but there are several ways to set up Serial ATA RAID. The two ATA/133 parallel RAID ports are controlled by a Hi-Point 372 chip which provides support for RAID 0 (Striping), 1 (Mirroring) and 0 + 1 (mirroring and striping). Striping disks allows for high performance, while mirroring provides protection against disk failure by copying an exact image of the data from one disk to another.

There are four SATA ports on the board, two of which can be set up in a RAID array by using the RAID function of the Intel ICH5R Southbridge, which supports RAID 0, while the other two are supported by an ALI M5281 chip which provides RAID 0 and 1 support. For expansion cards there are five PCI slots, while the 8X AGP slot has a neat and tidy sliding locking mechanism for holding the graphics card in place.

Integrated on the board is 5.1-channel audio via a CMI 8738 chip which also supports optical and co-axial SPDIF outputs. These are available on a back plate included with the board. You also get Gigabit LAN onboard. The back panel features four USB 2.0 ports while another four are supported by headers on the motherboard; similarly there is a single FireWire port on the back panel with headers for another two.

The reason for the large box in which the P4I875P Dragon 2 is packaged becomes apparent when you start to sift through the extra hardware supplied with it; a Sigma Box, a 9-in-1 USB 2.0 card reader with USB 2.0 and FireWire ports that fits in a 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch drive bay, four Serial ATA data cables, three ATA cables, a floppy cable, a driver CD, a 'Bonus 8 in 1 CD Pack'... and Soyo even supplies some thermal paste for the heatsink.

Verdict
Soyo's P4I875P Dragon 2 v1.0 is a feature-rich motherboard which is easy to set up and run. It may seem expensive at first glance but it does come with a boxful of extras.

Company: Soyo

Contact: 020 8574 5592

Tags: serial ata universal serial bus ieee 1394 interface raid standard raid levels hard disk drive hardware storage