Conclusions:
I was a little wary of the SiS 645 chipset before working with the Soyo P4S Dragon for several weeks. The end result has been quite reliable, and the motherboard more than satisfying on the feature side. There really isn't much we could be asking for aside from possibly USB2.0 support or Firewire.
Soyo have really presented the user with a valuable and trustworthy motherboard. The internal USB box could have been a bit more useful if Soyo had packed it with flash media readers, or more than just four USB ports. For the amount of space it takes up, the draped cables, and all the rest, the box is useful, but seems under utilized.
The SiS 645 chipset allowed us to overclock out 2.0 GHz
Williamette to 2.16GHz which is pretty good for this chip. Other boards have
allowed us to go a little higher, but then again this is a Williamette we are
talking about. It would be interesting to see how a 1.6A Northwood would handle
on the Soyo, but for the moment we'll just have to leave that one rest.
The onboard 10/100 NIC is not something overclocker's are
going to like because they tend to see it as something which will just slow down
their computer, and tax the CPU unnecessarily. While it can be disabled in the
BIOS, onboard networking really does represent a great savings to the user.
Under normal situations a NIC card costs about $25-30 CDN, and not having to
spend that extra amount is more than a welcome sight. Thanks to the C-Media
chipset on the PCB, really good quality sound is also effectively built into the
all-black Soyo P4S Dragon.
Bottom line, the Soyo P4S Dragon is a wickedly cool
looking mainboard with everything under the sun onboard; networking, sound, USB
1.1, HighPoint IDE RAID, you name it. There is little find at fault on the
Dragon, and from our experiences the reliability has been really great. Easily
recommended!
3DMark2001
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