Layout
The board comes in your usual carry box. The board itself is wrapped in your typical anti-static wrap. Underneith the board are all the accesories and goodies.
The motherboard's PCB is black. The board is quite colorful with its purple DIMM and PCI slots, yellow, blue and white IDE slots and green and red USB and Audio headers. I guess this makes the different slots and headers easier to spot.
The socket is your typical socket 478. The usual capacitors line up the sides of the retention mechanism but doesn't create any obstacle with regards to heatsink installation. The only issue that we encountered was that the area between the retention mechanism and the northbridge grill was a bit tight. We however were able to squeeze in our heatsink easily.
The ATX power supply header is located on the lower right side of the pcb and is directly below the dimm slots. In this position, there is less clutter caused by power cables thereby aiding in the airflow inside the case. However, location of the P4 power cable is bad. It is situated right behind I/O panel between the socket and the AGP.
The Soyo SY-P4I875P uses the i875P chipset which supports four DDR DIMMs up to 4Gb maximum. Unlike in previous Canterwood boards that we have reviewed, the DIMM slots are not color coded for Dual Channel configuration. First timers would have to look at the manual for correct memory module pairing.
Clearance between the agp card and the dimm locks is excellent. There is more than enough room for you to add and remove RAM without having to remove the agp card. It also is fitted with an AGP lock that you slide in and out making sure that you AGP card is always in place. This is quite handy when moving your rig from place to place as in the case of LANs.
There are 5 PCI slots. Though not the maximum for this board, it is more than enough slots for all your PCI needs. Together with a lot of onboard devices, you wouldn't have to use this as commonly as you would.
Included in the package is the Soyo's front panel, the Sigma box, which we will talk about later in the review. It houses the 6-in-1 USB 2.0 flash memory reader/writer, 2 front USB 2.0 ports, 2 front IEEE 1394 Firewire ports. There is also the presence of a Clear CMOS in the front port. This is really good especially at times when you have pushed your system too much. Although most boards now has a revert BIOS function, it is still a good thing to have. With this switch, you will never have to open your case just to clear the CMOS chip.
Onboard LAN is provided by an Intel 10/100 mbps ethernet chip. Soyo has decided to skip the Gigabit LAN with this model probably to reduce cost.
On board 6 Channel sound with digital output is provided by the CMI 8738 audio chip. It also supports optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs with extension bracket and cables included.
Onboard VIA VT6306 chip supports up to 3 x high speed IEEE 1394 ports aka Firewire. This IEEE1394 chip provides up to 400Mbps transfer rate.
Integrated 4-channel Serial ATA is provided. 2 SATA comes from the southbridge ICH5 chipset and another 2 SATA for RAID function courtesy of the Silicon Image Sil3112A chip providing RAID 0,1 function. The big difference this has over ICH5R's RAID capability is that the Silicon chip can support both RAID 0 and RAID 1 function. This is great news for those people who canot do without RAID 1. The ICH5R at the moment can only do RAID 0 (according to sources, Intel will soon release a new driver that will enable this to do RAID 1 as well).
There are four independent channels for eight IDE devices. Two available for RAID provided by the embedded Highpoint IDE-RAID chip, providing ATA133 IDE- RAID 0,1,0+1.
