Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Additional features

Additional features of the Soyo P4X400 Dragon Ultra motherboard include: Wake on LAN, Wake on Modem Ring, PS2 connectors for connecting mice & keyboards, 6 USB ports - two of which are located on the back panel, Power Failure Recovery, Suspend to Disk, RX/TX connectors for infrared, and start-up from the mouse, keyboard, or at a pre-set time. Hardware monitoring of fan speed, CPU temperature, and of voltages is also included as a standard feature of this PC99-compliant motherboard.

Finally, lest we forget, the P4X400 Dragon also comes with an integrated RAID card, and a six-channel CMI8738 sound-card capable of working with ingoing and outgoing digital signals.

Below, a photo of the Soyo P4X400 Dragon Ultra.

Installation

Installation of the P4X400 Dragon Ultra is extremely simple. Since there are no jumpers to fool around with, it suffices to insert the CPU and memory, plug everything in, and boot-up.

Note that by default, the P4X400 is configured to cease operation if a CPU fan is not detected. It is thus necessary to plug the fan into an appropriate connector, or else the system will shut down a few seconds after booting. What's more, because the fan connectors are so ill-placed, it is impossible to plug the fan in once the motherboard is installed -- unless you happen to be double-jointed, and possessed of an extremely spacious casing.

Software bundle

The installation CD includes the VIA 4-in-1 version 4.32v patch, drivers for the sound-card, a hardware monitoring utility, a Smart Card Reader utility, Microsoft DirectX 8, and a digital rendition of the user's manual. A second, bonus CD contain an 8-in-1 software pack includings: Norton Ghost, Norton Virtual Drive et Norton Antivirus 2001, ActiveShare, Vcom Autosave, WinDVD, EWalla, Imagemore, and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Hardware bundle

The P4X400 Dragon Ultra comes with: three 80-pin ATA66 cables, a floppy-drive cable, a cable for the SPDIF ports and of course the Sigma Box wich contains 4 front USB 2.0 ports.

Next: Specifications.

Soyo P4X400