SOYO's DRAGON-Plus Motherboard

If you're looking for a palatial home for your AMD CPU and money is no object, SOYO Computer's SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus looks like it has more bells and whistles than most folks even need. The SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus uses the VIA Apollo KT266A chipset, which supports AMD Athlon/Duron CPUs running at up to 266MHz FSB, and features an enhanced memory controller for DDR SDRAM. Soyo says the board enhances memory performance as much as 48 percent over previous models. The new SOYO DRAGON-Plus is also bundled with a Smart Card reader that you can stuff into one of your 3.5" drive bays and includes all the appropriate cables and driver software. Single board list price for the ATX form factor DRAGON-Plus motherboard is $175 U.S. The board includes five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (V2.2 compliant), one Universal AGP Pro slot with support for 1x/2x/4x mode graphics, and three 184-pin DDR SDRAM 2.5V DIMM sockets with support for up to 3GB of DDR memory. The SY-K7V has an on board CMI 8738 audio chip that gives you 6-channel speaker support with 3D surround sound. On board 10/100 Mbps Ethernet functionality is also available with VIA's PHY controller. The board's Ultra I/O Chip supports two RS-232 serial ports (16550 UART compatible), one parallel printer port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode), one FDD port (supports 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88 MB FDD), an IrDA port with optional cable for transceiver, and six USB ports (2 rear, 4 front). The board's Ultra DMA IDE ports provide support for four independent channels, which can accommodate eight IDE devices, including two for RAID. The embedded Promise FastTrak 100 Lite controller supports RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). The CPU core voltage, FSB and multiplier can all be adjusted via Award PCI BIOS setup. Support is also included for on-board hardware monitoring and includes SOYO's Hardware Health Utility. Among the hardware monitoring functions are CPU fan speed and temperature monitoring, WOL (Wake On LAN), software power-off controls and remote and/or alarm power-on control.