Product Reviews

If we gave motherboards awards based on looks and the amount of extras stuffed into the box, the Dragon 2 Platinum would waltz away with an armful. Its silver finish looks superb and it's awash with peripherals, starting with a separate 6-in-1 digital card reader. Designed to fit in a 3.5in bay, the reader comes with a caddy to allow installation in a full-size 5.25in bay if no floppy space is available. Alongside the card slots are two USB and two FireWire ports, and a great overclocking addition is the presence of a CMOS reset button recessed into the casing.

There's no shortage of mass-storage interfaces on the board itself, with a full eight separate channels available, comprising four SATA (Serial ATA) and four parallel ATA connections. The first two SATAs, as provided by the board's Intel 875P chipset, have RAID-0 capability and the second pair provides -0, -1, or -0+1 by way of the Silicon Image Sil3112A chipset.

Network support is integrated onto the board courtesy of an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, while six-channel audio is provided by the on-board C-Media CM8738 codec. Four USB ports and a FireWire port are rear mounted, while another two USB and two FireWire headers connect to the card reader's ports. A

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PCI blanking plate provides S/PDIF optical and analog I/O for the integrated audio chipset, with an extra two analog outs. If, after all that, you need even more expansion, there are five PCI slots.

As far as layout is concerned, being so completely stuffed with electronics and connectors, the Dragon could end up a victim of its own comprehensive feature set. As well as the four IDE, four SATA and floppy connections, there are five fan headers and the USB and FireWire connectors to cope with, potentially making for some tight wiring if you're planning to use the board to the full. The analog audio connectors are in between the third and fourth PCI slot too, which can cause clutter and hence poor airflow. The board also suffers from the common problem of the DIMM sockets being placed too close to the AGP slot, but that's only an issue on the rare occasions where you need to remove or install memory.

The Dragon 2 comes with a Phoenix Award BIOS, with options to control everything an overclocker might wish for. Lockable PCI clocks complement the large range of timing options in addition to the standard FSB overclock setting. A DRAM-to-CPU ratio setting allows for asynchronous memory over- or underclocking, while the memory tuning area even lets you select refresh mode.

Now to the bad news: most of these settings are moot, at least with the board we received, since it resolutely refused to overclock. Even when memory timings were relaxed, we couldn't get the board to POST at the merest 5MHz over the standard 200MHz FSB. Samples often perform wildly differently when overclocking, but it's unusual to encounter a piece of kit that fails to overclock at all.

The Soyo Dragon 2 is one of the most feature-laden boards we've seen, but for the overclockers among us it looks like this model is one to avoid.