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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on November 30, 2001
Company: Soyo
Product: K7V
Dragon Plus motherboard
Find
low Motherboard
prices here.
Installation
The purple colour of the PCI slots,
somewhat unsurprisingly, did not hinder the installation of
peripherals. The AGP Pro slow accommodated my large GeForce
2 Ultra comfortably, and the DIMM slots, despite being near
the AGP slot at one end, did not require the removal of the
video card before inserting or removing memory. The top end
of these memory slots is adjacent to two fan connectors, and
installing and removing fans from these connections is
somewhat awkward, although this is a minor bugbear.
Soyo has been very liberal with these
fan connectors, with two CPU fan connectors (with FOC)
as mentioned before above the DIMM slots. The other fan
connectors are to be located next to the green chipset
heatsink (for powering the northbridge chipset fan), next to
the AGP slot (useful for powering video card fans), and at
the bottom right of the board (well positioned to power an
intake fan).
The CPU socket is at the top of the
board, which would be near to the power supply in most
cases, but not too far up as to cause a problem adding or
removing a heatsink whilst the motherboard is installed. The
free bag of silicone has a sort of funnel, and unlike others
will not smear all over you as you try and apply it. The
socket has large capacitors to one side of it that did
obstruct my thumb as I installed several different heatsinks,
but they didn't cause any obstruction to the heatsinks
themselves.
The ATX power connector is in a slightly
awkward position, but the power loom could easily be routed
around the CPU heatsink, without obstruction. The four IDE
ports are on the right of the board as could be expected.
Switching on the power lighted up a
single green LED, visible near the bottom of the board. The
initial powering up of the motherboard did not get off to a
great start though. The motherboard always wanted to turn
itself off after five seconds. After consulting the
motherboard manual, I found out why. The Soyo employs FOC,
fan off control. If it cannot detect a fan presence in the
three pin fan connector (that is, if it does not get a
reading on the rotation wire) it will not boot, and if the
machine is active it will shut down. This caused a minor
problem as my CPU fan at the time was powered by Molex
connectors directly from the power supply. The problem was
resolved by attaching the connector from the Graphics card's
fan onto the CPU fan socket. I emailed Soyo telling them that
the motherboard switched itself off after five seconds of
booting, and they replied very promptly pointing out
correctly the issue with FOC.
Unfortunately for those who do not have
fans with a rotation function wire (if the motherboard is
water-cooled externally, or the fans are power directly from
the PSU) the motherboard cannot be used at all initially, as
the BIOS defaults enables FOC. However, as most people
should be using fans with rotation monitoring this shouldn't
be a problem, and is in fact a very useful feature (Athlons
can burn up after only a couple of minutes without active
cooling from a fan). FOC can be disabled in the BIOS once
the computer has gone through the initial stages of POST.
After coming to grips with FOC, windows
booted up first time, installed most devices and ran
perfectly. Drivers for the integrated network function, the
Promise RAID controller, as well as via chipset drivers,
were on the CD with newer versions available from Soyo's
website. Interestingly if the promise channels were to be
used for RAID, a different driver must be used than the one
that is supplied for Ultra100 usage.
Technical
specifications
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Embedded Promise IDE RAID chip,
provides IDE RAID 0 & 1
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On board 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
function by ICS PHY controller
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Fan off control
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Supports AMD Socket-A type Processor
(Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, 100 or 133 MHz
FSB)
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VIA KT266A/8233 CE Ver chipset
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Three 184-pin DDR DIMM sockets
Support up to 3 GB RAM
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Five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots
(PCI 2.2 compliant)
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One Universal AGP Pro slot (supports
1x/2x/4x mode)
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On board CMI 8738 Audio chip to
provide a 6 channel audio solution
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Provides 6 USB ports (2 rear, 4
front)
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Four independent channels for up to
eight IDE devices
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External sound expansion card
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Includes Z-Box
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ATX form factor 30.5cm x 23cm
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Four fan connectors
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