Friday, October 12, 2001

Additional features

Additional features of the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon 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.

Last but not least, the Dragon also comes complete with an integrated Ethernet controller, a RAID controller, and a CMI8738 audio-chip that supports 6-channel audio out, and the treatment of incoming and outgoing optical signals.

Below, a photo of the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon.

Click here for a larger image...

Installation

Installation of the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon is quite simple. Since there are no jumpers to configure, users need only install the necessary components, place the board in a case, plug-in, and boot-up.

Please note that the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon is configured to automatically cease operation if the CPU fan is not detected. It's thus critical to plug it into the appropriate connector, or else the system will stop in its tracks only a few seconds after starting up. It also has to be noted that the fan connectors are very badly placed, so most users will find it impossible to plug their fans in once the board is installed - unless they happen to be double-jointed. So, take care to get everything plugged-in correctly the first time around.

The software bundle

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

The hardware bundle

The Soyo SY-K7V Dragon comes with: three 80-pin ATA66 cables, a floppy-drive cable, and a connector for the SPDIF, optical-signal audio in/out channels, complete with a central line for base frequencies.

Next: Specifications.