A trip around the board
Just looking over the surface of the board, it's obvious that the Dragon Plus was designed with the enthusiast in mind. Let's take a quick tour of the board and check out some of the more interesting features. We'll start with a picture of the full board:

First up is the on-board LAN connector. Granted, NICs can be found pretty cheap these days, but not having to fill a PCI slot with one sure is nice. As I mentioned, Soyo thoughtfully includes a connector plate for your case with all the proper cutouts for the Dragon Plus's many connectors, including the NIC.

In an increasingly common practice, Soyo has an active heatsink on the VIA North Bridge. As an overclocker, I like this a lot, as it saves the enthusiast the trouble of hacking together something of their own. It should also help considerably when you start exploring the higher end of the 100-233MHz front side bus range.

Next is the Promise on-board RAID. This is sort of a mixed blessing; the controller used here is a "lite" version that only supports two-drive arrays. Boards that use Highpoint chips don't have these restrictions and can run four-drive arrays in RAID 0, 1 or 0+1 configurations. On the other hand, the Highpoint chips have a history of problems with ATAPI devices, and if you want, you can jumper the Promise chip to be a regular ATA-100 controller. That gives you a lot of flexibility. As for the RAID deficiencies, the argument could be made that if you are going to go so far as to create a three- or four-drive RAID array, you should probably go with a better controller than the ones found on motherboards.

Just to one side of the last PCI slot are a number of internal connectors. From left to right, they are the smartcard connector, a serial infrared header, and two USB headers that support two ports each. A little further down the board, we see a fan connector. It's not terribly remarkable in itself, but there are a total of four such fan connectors on the Dragon Plus, and they are all strategically placed. This one is obviously for a fan at the bottom front of a tower case; another is found above the AGP connector, and is intended to power a fan in the back of the case below the power supply. Finally there are two headers just above the DIMM sockets for CPU fans.

Also in the area of the USB headers is a green LED that indicates the presence of standby power. While this isn't as good as a diagnostic display with error codes, it at least helps you troubleshoot basic "why won't it turn on" problems. Incidentally, the LED does a good job of illuminating the CMOS clear jumper, which saved me the trouble of finding a flashlight. But I'll talk more about that in the overclocking section.

Then there's the on-board audio courtesy of C-Media. I've been using this audio the entire time I've been evaluating the Dragon Plus, and I'm extremely impressed with it. It sounds great to me, and it doesn't seem to suffer from the noise or interference issues that plague some other on-board audio solutions. In addition to the huge number of connectors list in the features chart above, the board has both types of analog CD headers as well as a digital CD input. Also located nearby is the WOL connector for the on-board Ethernet.

Finally, although it's not on the motherboard per se, let's take a look at the 3.5" mounting plate. As mentioned earlier, the plate has a smartcard reader and two USB connectors, and also includes a 5.25" adapter if you would rather mount it in a larger drive bay. The smartcard slot is sized to fit a credit card, though a cardboard adapter is included to allow SIM cards from cell phones to be inserted, as well.

Several credit card companies are including smartcard technology with their cards. American Express Blue is probably the best-known example. Currently, however, all my research indicates that each card will only work with its own smartcard software, which in turn will only work with its own smartcard reader. Hopefully this situation will change in the future; it seems silly to need one smartcard reader for each different smartcard.

Included with the DRAGON Plus is a product called "ITE GSM Editor" which is meant to interface with the SIM cards included in some cell phones. It includes the ability to retrieve and edit phone book data stored on the SIM card, allowing the user to easily back up their phone book data as well as add new data using the computer's keyboard for data entry. Unfortunately I do not have access to a cell phone with a SIM card, so I was unable to test this functionality.

My opinion is that the smartcard reader is currently of limited usefulness, but that's not really Soyo's fault. If further standards are established, it's possible that the reader will gain additional functionality as time goes on. It is also possible (I'm treading on unfamiliar territory here) that the smartcard reader has more utility in Europe or Asia, but I can't really speak to that. The bottom line is, the 3.5" plate provides a nice presentation for the two front-mounted USB ports; if you can use the smartcard reader too, all the better.