FREMONT, CA (October 3, 2001) – SOYO Computer, Inc. today announced the SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus – a revised model of its award-winning board for AMD CPUs, which features VIA's KT266A chipset and a new memory controller to boost performance.

The new SOYO SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus motherboard features the VIA Apollo KT266A chipset, which supports AMD Athlon/Duron CPUs, running at up to 266MHz FSB. Combined with an enhanced memory controller that compliments the higher performance of DDR memory over DRAM, the DRAGON-Plus enhances memory performance as much as 48 percent over prior models.

The new SOYO DRAGON-Plus is also bundled with a Smart Card reader for future electronic commerce and network security applications. The Smart Card reader occupies an empty 3.5-inch drive bay and includes all appropriate cables and driver software. Smart Card (PC/SC) standard technology not only provides secure access to systems, businesses will benefit from the multitude of other smart card applications/functions such as secured transaction procession and payments, secured storage of private information, medical and citizen information, and personal contacts.

Single board list price for the DRAGON-Plus motherboard is $175 U.S. Discounts are offered to volume buyers and system builders.

The SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus comes in an ATX form factor. The board includes five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (V2.2 compliant), and one Universal AGP Pro slot with support for 1x/2x/4x mode graphics. With its AGP Pro slot, the DRAGON-Plus motherboard offers a dedicated, high-speed port for the movement of large blocks of 3D texture data between the PC's graphics controller and enhanced system memory. This makes it a speedy board for real-time video editing, graphics processing, video streaming, speech recognition, and a variety of mainstream applications.

The DRAGON-Plus memory is expandable with three 184-pin DDR SDRAM 2.5V DIMM sockets, and support for up to 3GBs of DDR memory.

The SY-K7V includes an on board CMI 8738 audio chip, which provides 6-channel speaker support with 3D surround sound. On board 10/100 Mbps Ethernet functionality is also available with VIA's PHY controller. The board's Ultra I/O Chip includes two RS-232 serial ports (16550 UART compatible); one parallel printer port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode), one FDD port (supports 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88 MB FDD; an IrDA port with optional cable for transceiver, and six USB ports (2 rear, 4 front). The board's Ultra DMA IDE ports provide support for four independent channels, which can accommodate eight IDE devices, including two for RAID.

SOYO has integrated a number of enhanced system management capabilities into the SY-K7V DRAGON-Plus motherboard. The embedded Promise FastTrak 100 Lite controller supports RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). The CPU core voltage, FSB and multiplier can all be adjusted via Award PCI BIOS setup. Support is also included for on-board hardware monitoring and includes SOYO's Hardware Health Utility to streamline PC system management. Among the many hardware monitoring functions are CPU fan speed and temperature monitoring; WOL (Wake On LAN) function to simplify network management; software power-off controls and remote and/or alarm power-on control.