Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

Soyo P4I Fire Dragon

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The first thing that is truly eye-catching about the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon isn't the feature list, rather it's the limited-edition packaging that the board comes in:

The box, the manual and even the driver CD all proudly display the US flag and send a very supportive message from the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer.

While this has no bearing on the actual product itself, it is a nice gesture but what would have been even more supportive of the cause is a small donation to the families of 9/11 victims for every one of these limited edition boards that is sold. Maybe that's wishful thinking on our part but we'd still like to commend Soyo on showing their support with the packaging of the P4I Fire Dragon. Update: Soyo has informed us that for every limited edition Soyo P4I Fire Dragon purchased they will donate $5 to the American Red Cross 911 Disaster Relief Fund. Now onto the motherboard itself.

The Fire Dragon is the only board out of this roundup not to offer a CNR slot, which isn't really a loss since most CNR slots do go unused even by OEMs. The 6 PCI slots are commonplace on most 845 DDR motherboards and we see that Soyo has stuck to Intel's specification allowing only 2 DIMM slots to be present on the motherboard.

Their Award BIOS setup offers very flexible options for the overclocker with FSB frequencies ranging from 100 - 255MHz (with only a small percentage of those actually being useful) and the ability to adjust CPU core, AGP and DRAM voltages.

Onboard IDE RAID is driven by the HighPoint HPT372 ATA-133 controller with support for RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 as well as simple spanned arrays. Unfortunately this implementation suffers the same fate as ABIT's HPT372 controller as the maximum stripe size is limited at 64KB.

The board's audio is driven by CMedia's 6-channel controller which can also be found on the Chaintech and MSI boards. Unlike those two manufacturers, Soyo actually bundled the board with a bracket that features outputs for the rears, center and sub outputs.

The Fire Dragon features onboard LAN driven by the same Intel PHY that is on the Gigabyte board but instead of offering USB 2.0 support the board has an integrated Texas Instruments IEEE-1934 controller. There is one IEEE-1394 port on the board itself while the other ports are on a panel that installs into a 5.25" drive bay. This box features one IEEE-1394 port, two USB 1.1 ports and a smart card reader which also interfaces with the Fire Dragon.

Overall the board is very feature packed and provides some good competition for the Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR.