The K7V DRAGON Plus is one of Soyo's latest in their line of DRAGON motherboards. DRAGON is not merely a cool sounding name that Soyo stuck on their motherboards. DRAGON really stands for:

DDR - Unlike many of Soyo's competitors who offer motherboards with 2 DDR slots, the K7V DRAGON Plus sports 3 DDR slots. This gives the board the ability to support up to 3GB of memory.

Raid controller onboard - The onboard Promise RAID controller expands the motherboard's ATA100 IDE device support to a grand total of 8. Through a jumper located next to the CMOS battery, you can switch the Promise controller between support for RAID 0/1 and plain ATA33/66/100. Even thought the BIOS uses Fasttrak100 Lite, I did not notice any difference between the onboard controller BIOS functions and that of my Fasttrak100 card.

Audio onboard - The onboard audio is based on a C-Media CMI8738PCI audio chip. Blah, onboard audio stinks you say? Unlike the standard AC'97 audio chips offered on other motherboards, the C-Media chip actually sounds just as good as my Soundblaster Live! card. In addition to the standard analog input/output, this chipset also supports optical input and SPDIF output along with support for 4/5/5.1 speakers.

Graphic - The Universal AGP Pro slot found on this board offers compatibility for more video cards. Not that I've actually used an AGP Pro card, it's still nice to know the board can support it should I do get one.

Overclocking - This motherboard offers jumperless overclocking capability may just catch the hardware enthusiast's eyes. (We'll save the juicy details for later.)

Network - The last, but not least, feature of the K7V DRAGON Plus is it's onboard VIA 10/100 baseT Ethernet network controller. During my usage testing this motherboard, this network controller worked flawlessly as a surfed my way around the Internet on my DSL connection.

All these features packed into a single board are noteworthy indeed. The integrated components chosen for this board is of top notch quality. This goes to prove you don't have to sacrifice performance for value. As if all these features weren't enough, there are still MORE extras (yes, you heard right). The DRAGON comes with a 3.5" SIM card reader with 2 USB ports, a 5.25" adapter for the reader, and even thermal compound! One thing I noticed was since the induction of the ATA66 standard, most manufacturers have bee fairly cheap on providing the consumers with ATA66 cables. The usual case would be to include one ATA66 cable, an old school ATA cable, and the ever-present FDD cable. Soyo breaks the trend by offering 3 (you heard me) ATA66 along with a FDD cable. Finally, there's the bundled software that came with the DRAGON. This bundle actually comes with stuff you can use: Norton Antivirus 2001, Norton Ghost, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe ActiveShare. Let's move on to details on the board itself.