Motherboard: SOYO SY-P4I Fire Dragon Review :: Installation

The motherboard is designed in a jumper-less configuration for ease of use, and a simple setup that even a beginner can understand and accomplish. If you have never installed or replaced a motherboard you should probably read this first to help get you on your way. The board is laid out in a very well thought out fashion with all the ATA connectors together which helps cut down on your internal cable mess.

All the tweaking on this motherboard is done within the BIOS and this is where the SOYO combo feature comes into play as a BIOS driven overclocking utility. The P4I Fire Dragon has its demons to contend with, as this feature has been known to make the motherboard unworkable after attempting to use it. There have been many complaints within our own forums as well as negative feedback in many news groups concerning this.

This is a factor that they were supposed to address in our own forums but never seemed to happen to my disappointment. The board did not die when I tried to SOYO Combo feature but I did have to reset the BIOS to get it to post after attempting to use it, which is very bad in its design and outcome. It would have been nice to see this feature work, as this would be a great thing for the beginning overclocker.

I tried many different setting variations in an attempt to get this board to overclock stably but I was never able to get the board to post after 110MHz. This makes the board fall below our minimum qualifications standard as an overclocker. I was very disappointed with this as this is the first board I have seen in a long time that just plain would not overclock; even in baby steps this board was unstable in an overclocked state.

If you are using the RAID array you will need to use two of the exact same drives in your configuration for this to function properly. The installation and configuration of this board is overall very easy with only the RAID option forming any real challenge. Windows and all the system driver software was installed without error and the entire process took about forty-five minutes.