Monday, January 21, 2002

Additional features

Additional features of the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus 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.

Let's also not forget the integrated LAN, and RAID controllers, as well as the integrated CMI8738-based audio-card.

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

Installation

Installation of the SY-K7V Dragon Plus is very simple. Since there are no jumpers to set, the entire procedure consists of plugging-in the proper components, putting the board in a case, supplying it with some AC, and booting-up.

One thing worth noting is that the Dragon Plus is designed to automatically shutdown in the case on a CPU-fan failure. Its important to thus insure that the fan is plugged in to the correct jack, lest the system shutdown shortly after booting. It should also be mentioned that the fan connectors are all very badly situated. As a result, users will need to be contortionists to get access to them once the board is installed in a case, so it's worth sure that everything is properly relayed before installation.

The software bundle

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

The hardware bundle

The SY-K7V Dragon Plus comes with: Three 80-pin ATA66 cables, a floppy-drive cable, and a connector for the all the various audio in/out ports.

Next: Specifications.