The BIOS
Back in the day, we were happy with a BIOS that let us manipulate motherboard settings without jumpers. Now, we've come to expect all sorts of tweaking and overclocking options be available through the only blue screen I'm comfortable seeing.

SOYO consolidates

SOYO consolidates the more important BIOS settings on a single screen with the SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra. If you're lucky enough to have an unlocked Pentium 4, you can play with the multiplier, but otherwise you'll have to be content with front-side bus manipulation. Unfortunately, the front-side bus speed offerings depend on whether your processor is meant to run on a 400 or 533MHz bus. For 400MHz bus Pentium 4s, you get front-side bus options from 100 to 132MHz in 1MHz increments. With a newer Pentium 4 that supports a 533MHz bus, the front-side bus range is 133 to 165MHz in 1MHz increments.

The available front-side bus options should be enough for casual overclocking, but if you're looking to take a Pentium 4 'A' revision to extreme speeds, you'll probably hit a wall at 132MHz. Limiting bus speeds isn't actually that bad of an idea for the SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra considering the BIOS doesn't let users arbitrarily change the PCI or AGP bus dividers.

When running an overclocked system, a little extra voltage always helps. The SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra's BIOS lets you set CPU voltages between 1.1 and 1.85MHz in 0.025V increments, DRAM voltages between 2.6 and 2.8V in 0.1V increments, and AGP voltages between 1.6 and 1.8V in 0.1V increments. The voltage options aren't as extensive as those offered by a few other overclocking-centric boards, but there should enough there for all but the most extreme overclocking endeavors.

How far can you push your memory?

As expected, the SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra offers a full range of memory tweaking options that should let you push your memory to its limits. CAS latencies as low as 1.5 are supported, but I'm not aware of any DIMMs that will run with such aggressive timings.

AGP 8X supported

AGP 8X is supported by the SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra's P4X400 chipset, but if you're having problems with compatibility, you can always throttle things down to AGP 4X. The BIOS also gives users control over the standard list of AGP variables.

Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of safety or monitoring features in the SY-P4X400 DRAGON Ultra's BIOS. About all you can do to protect your system is set a CPU shutdown temperature. SOYO does offer a Windows-based hardware monitoring utility that will at least let you set alarms for fan failure and CPU temperature in software.