The layout
Soyo's DRAGON line has never had the most reserved aesthetic, and the SY-P4I875P is no exception. The silver board and multicolored slots and plugs might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it actually looks rather nice in an aluminum case. In a sea of red and blue motherboards from other manufacturers, the SY-P4I875P's silver and purple color scheme is sure to turn a few heads.
Despite being packed with all sorts of hardware, Soyo's use of color coded plugs actually makes the SY-P4I875P pretty easy to work with. The board's power connectors are a little too far from the board's upper edge for my liking. This placement creates more cable clutter than is really necessary.
Intel's Socket 478 heat sink retention mechanism guarantees a certain amount of clearance, and the SY-P4I875P's socket area is no exception. A row of capacitors along the board's top edge could get in the way if heat sinks fan out from the retention mechanism, as could the board's north bridge heat sink, but there's plenty of clearance for all the heat sinks I have here in the benchmarking sweatshop.
Like just about every other Canterwood board, the SY-P4I875P has four DIMM slots to accommodate two dual-channel memory pairs.
Around the AGP slot, the SY-P4I875P has plenty of clearance for longer graphics cards. Users with shorter graphics cards should be able to swap out memory modules without removing the card, too.
Five purple PCI slots adorn the SY-P4I875P. Five should be plenty considering how many integrated peripherals the board is already packing. Soyo uses a non-standard AGP card retention mechanism, but I actually prefer this new slider to the old flip tab.
The SY-P4I875P's port cluster is full of goodies, including PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, and parallel and serial ports. Four of the board's USB ports and one of its Firewire ports also grace the cluster, along with a Gigabit Ethernet port. Analog front output, line-in, and mic input jacks also make an appearance in the port cluster, but the bulk of the board's audio jacks are included on a PCI expansion header. On the header, Soyo serves up analog center and rear output channels, plus optical and coaxial digital input and output ports.
