Soyo P4I875 Dragon 2: Mega Features With Weaknesses, Continued
The packaging of the Soyo is confusing, covered with stickers as well as various typefaces and colors.
Positive features are the AGP-LED and the passively-cooled Northbridge. Although Soyo encloses three IDE and four Serial-ATA cables, they dispense with a voltage adapter for hard drives. Points to criticize are the pins of the plug-in strip, which are not labeled, and the cheap slot panel, which is without color-coding. Thus, the purchaser acquires a wide-ranging software package with more or less useful programs. For fans of the brand there is even a sticker that hopefully shows its effect when affixed to the tower. There is room for improvement in the case of the fan control for the CPU: there is no possible way to adjust the rotational speed to temperature.
Sound chip for 5.1 audio.
View of the connections.
Included in the Soyo package.
In terms of performance, the board demonstrates below-average qualities. The weaknesses of the Soyo are especially seen with the memory throughput. With 4.7 GB/s, performance is significantly less than, for example, that of the Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra with 5.1 GB/s.
Our assessment in brief: Soyo offers many features with some restrictions in performance and fan control. Otherwise, the box is full to bursting, and it costs just under $220 in the shops. In view of its features, the price is still justified.