I started this review by giving a little peek at what's just been announced from Intel for the motherboard chipset arena. Soyo will have boards based on both the newly released Grantsdale and Alderwood chipsets for the Land Grid Array Socket 775 CPUs. I think it only fitting that I start my conclusion talking about the same thing. If you must absolutely buy a motherboard today a board based upon the i865 chipset may be worth your while. Keep in mind; however the upgrade path from a 865 to the next generation chipset you will not allow you to keep your AGP card, or CPU in the same system.
The Soyo SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0 is a rather middle of the road 865 board. To really be outstanding this boards needs something more like 4 SATA connectors and 6 PCI slots. As it is, performance is middle of the road for Intel 865 boards on the Dragon 2 V1.0. I've enjoyed other Soyo boards like the CK8S Dragon Ultra using the nForce3 chipset, but this one just doesn't excite me.
What are the pluses of the board? It does have a good software bundle. The inclusion of Panda Platinum Anti-Virus which is one of my favorite AV software writers is a definite plus. Also it's a 865 based motherboard which you can't really go wrong with as a platform for Intel Pentium 4 CPUs. Installation was easy as pie and the hassle-free SATA installation was a definite plus.
