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Posted: April 9th, 2002
Written by: Tuan Huynh
Conclusion
With the vast majority of the boards available on the market right now performing within 1-3% within each other, it’s really hard to decide which board to buy. In the end it really just comes down to features or how pretty the board looks. The Fire Dragon is an all around great board with little flaws that won’t cause any problems unless you plan on overclocking.
Being a very attractive board from first sight with its red, white, and blue color scheme, the Fire Dragon would be perfect for use in a case with a window, coupled with a red graphics card such as a Gainward GeForce 4 or Gigabyte MAYA 8500.
The color is not the only thing that keeps the board attractive. With the overclocking features, 5.1 C-Media audio, Z-Box, software bundle, Ethernet, and Firewire, the features keep the board attractive. The Z-box is a very nice feature as it gives you the ability to lock your computer using a smart card like the ones they use in satellite receivers as well as route your USB and Firewire ports up front for easy access and installation of your Digital Camera or DV camcorder.
The Fire Dragon is also one of the highest overclocking i845D boards as I was able to get a Northwood 2.2 GHz running at 2.6 GHz.
In the end you can’t go wrong with the Fire Dragon, though only falling 1-3% behind the Abit BD7-RAID, the features of the P4I Fire Dragon make it extremely attractive. For about $200, the Fire Dragon is a little pricey, but for every board sold, Soyo will donate $5 to the Red Cross for the Sept 11 incident. If you’re looking for an all around feature rich board, you can’t go wrong with the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon as it sports many features and only has little flaws that can be fixed with later BIOS updates.
Pros
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Firewire
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ATA133/RAID
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C-Media 5.1 Onboard
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Z-Box
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Overclocking features
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$5 donation to Red Cross for each board sold
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Red, White, and Blue color scheme
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Excellent manual
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Software bundle
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Highest overclocking i845D board I’ve come across
Cons-
VCORE won’t go past 1.625, even though the BIOS has a 1.7v option
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Price
Overall 98%
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