This board is pretty much the opposite of Soyo’s last Intel based motherboard, the P4I Fire Dragon, which had just about every feature known to man thrown in, (and a big price tag). This board is all about value, and just the basics are included, a driver CD and Soyo’s excellent 8-in-1 bonus pack featuring several very useful Norton utilities, two ATA-133 cables, a floppy and SATA cable, and a quick start guide, which is frankly a bit on the slim side. It comes in at a mere 30 pages, certainly a far cry from the 200+ page novels that accompany Dragon motherboards. If you’re new to system building this is something to consider, as the manual really doesn’t go into setup and using the BIOS. Unfortunately, a USB 2.0 bracket is MIA, but there are still the two headers on the board allowing for a total of 6.
On to the motherboard, here are the specs:
Processors
• Supports all Socket 478 CPUs (400FSB & 533FSB)
Chipset
• North bridge: Intel I845PE MCH
• South bridge: Intel ICH4
System Memory
• 3 x 184-pin DDR SDRAM
• DDR200 / DDR266 / DDR333 support @ 2.5v
• 3GB maximum system RAM
Slots
• AGP slot, 4x AGP compliant (1.5v support only)
• 6 x 32-bit PCI 33MHz slots
On-board peripherals - I/O
• 1 floppy port supports 2 FDD
• 3 Audio Jacks for the CMI9738 sound chipset
• CMI9738 4-channel sound
• Davicom 10/100 LAN (10/100 Mbit/s)
• 2 USB2.0 ports and a further 4 available via headers
• PS/2 ports
On-board IDE
• An IDE controller on the ICH4 chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master, and Ultra DMA/100/66/ operation modes
• Highpoint HPT371 RAID single-channel ATA133 RAID controller
• Ultra DMA/ATA133, 100, 66, 33 operation modes
• Supports up to 2 hard drives
• Serial ATA support via the Marvell 88I8030 single-ATA bridge
• Supports 1 S-ATA drive
BIOS & Voltages
• FSB speeds of 100Mhz - 255Mhz (quad-pumped)
• 1.1 - 1.85v Vcore adjustable in 0.025v increments
• 2.5v - 2.8v Vmem adjustable in 0.1v increments
• 1.5v - 1.8v VAGP adjustment
• Fix AGP/PCI speeds and variable settings.
Alrighty, that was a fun read huh? Now let’s get a look at ‘er.
