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The P4I Fire Dragon, as the name suggests, has the
additional functionality of Dual Fire Wire ports. As
you will see in the shot below, the P4I Fire Dragon's drive
bay break out box, also has a Fire Wire port in it for easy
access to this feature.
Interestingly enough, the
designers at Soyo set out to pay tribute to the United
States, utilizing a red PCB with blue PCI slots and white
EIDE connectors. They also included an American flag
image with the Soyo logo, on the i845D chipset heat sink.
The retail box itself has the words "United We Stand" on it,
with the American flag in the background. Soyo's
tribute to the US on this product, symbolizes their
sincerity in support of the United States, in our recovery
from the tragedy of the World Trade Centers on 9/11/2001.
In addition, we are told that for every Limited Edition Fire
Dragon board that is sold, Soyo will donate $5 to the Red
Cross for the disaster relief fund. Now that's what we
here at HotHardware call a "class act".
All told, the feature list of the P4I Fire Dragon is simply
amazing. It is easily the most well equipped
motherboard we have ever seen in the HotHardware Labs.
Let's move on to the setup.
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Installation / Setup With The P4S Dragon Ultra
and The P4I Fire Dragon |
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Not exactly smooth
sailing |
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First, we'll
give you a quick look at what the BIOS options are like for
each of these DDR powered monsters from Soyo.
P4S Dragon Ultra
BIOS Setup:
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CPU
FSB
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CPU/DRAM Ratio
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DRAM
Timing
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CPU Voltage
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DDR Voltage
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AGP Voltage
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P4I Fire Dragon
BIOS Setup:
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CPU
FSB
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System Perf.
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DRAM
Timing
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CPU Voltage
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DDR Voltage
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AGP Voltage
| As you can see,
the only real meaningful difference between the two BIOSes,
is that the P4S Dragon Ultra "officially" supports DDR333
and you'll get additional CPU FSB / DRAM Timing Ratio
settings. As a result, you can dial in a number of
different CPU FSB/DRAM clock settings that give you
significantly more flexibility, when over-clocking for
example. The P4I Fire Dragon allows you to set the
memory timing to DDR200 or DDR266. This essentially
sets the board up to the FSB+33 MHz. or just synchronized
with the FSB at 100MHz, in the case of the DDR200 setting.
So when you over-clock at the DDR266 setting, you are adding
MHz to an already 266MHz memory bus and the same goes for
the DDR200 setting.
Both the P4S
Dragon Ultra and the P4I Fire Dragon have superb BIOS
features. As you can see, you can also set the CPU,
DDR DRAM and AGP Voltage individually in the BIOS.
There was a fairly notable "fly in the ointment" with both
of these boards however. In both cases, the current
BIOS revisions had problems setting the CPU voltage and
often times either wouldn't boot or had to be hard reset to
get the voltage settings to take affect. Additionally,
any setting for the P4I Fire Dragon, above 1.7V caused the
board to completely power down and when powered up again, it
completely cleared the CMOS. In any event, these
quirks were more of a nuisance than anything else and didn't
stop us from testing and over-clocking the boards.
However, we are extremely hopeful that Soyo will work on
refining the BIOS for each of these boards and provide the
ever important fixes that they truly need.
Speaking of
overclocking, let's show you what these boards are really
made of.
Over-clocking and SiSoftware Sandra Tests
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