SOYO's Fire DRAGON P4 DDR Motherboard

If Santa brings you that shiny new P4 you've been asking for but you were too naughty last year to rate a DDR-based motherboard as well, you may have to drop a few bucks to get your new system running, and if you decide to use SOYO's new SY-P41 Fire DRAGON motherboard, a few of those bucks will go to a good cause. The Fire DRAGON features an Intel i845D chipset for Intel Socket-478 motherboards and a special edition of the board will feature a red, white and blue color scheme, along with a commitment from SOYO to donate $5 from the sale of every motherboard to the American Red Cross 911 Disaster Relief Fund. Single board list price for the SY-P41 will be $190 (U.S.). It features an IEEE 1394 Firewire port, embedded RAID, 6 channel on-board sound,10/100 Ethernet, and a 400MHz system bus. Thanks to the i845D chipset, it also lets you use DDR SDRAM. The embedded IDE-RAID chip provides RAID Levels 0 (data striping), Level 1 (disk mirroring), or Levels 0+1. SOYO also includes its "sigma box" line of peripherals, which occupies a standard 3.5" drive bay for connecting additional devices to the front of your system. The sigma box included with the Fire DRAGON motherboard features an IEEE 1394 Firewire port, two extra USB ports, and a Smart Card reader. Other standard features on the Fire DRAGON motherboard include an AGP Pro slot, two 184-pin DDR SDRAM 2.5V DIMM sockets to support up to 2GB of memory, and six 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (V2.2 compliant). The on board 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), IrDA/FIR ports with optional cable for transceiver, and four USB ports. The Fire DRAGON also features Ultra DMA IDE ports, which support four independent channels to accommodate eight IDE devices, including two for RAID.