SOYO-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Motherboard (Platinum Edition)

Today we take a look at the newest release from SOYO, the Dragon Ultra KT400 Platinum Edition. Right now, SOYO offers only the Platinum Edition KT400 board which is similar to their former KT333 platinum edition which has a silver PCB. SOYO certainly has a very good thing going for them here with their Dragon series of boards and it’s no wonder they don’t want to make much changes to this well selling model. In terms of features the Dragon boards are undoubtedly second to none.

 

Keeping up the tradition of the SOYO Dragon boards, the KT400 Dragon Ultra Platinum edition comes with an array of features and accessories. This time, the standard E-box comes equipped with two USB ports and a smart card reader. The smart card reader is a good choice as it allows users to use their smart card memory without spending extra on a reader.

Furthermore, SOYO includes an audio header to make use of the 6-channel audio chip. This is something not many manufactures include along with the retail purchase of a mainboard, which is very handy to have.

In addition, SOYO also includes a sachet of thermal paste, Three ATA133 IDE cables and one floppy drive cable. The KT400 Dragon Ultra has a standard board layout consisting of 1x AGP slot, 5x PCI slots, 3x DDR memory slots supporting up to 3GB of memory. If you’re using DDR 400 memory the maximum amount of memory you can use is 2GB. I’m sure none of you out there need to worry too much about this fact.

One thing I truly love about these boards is the placement of the components within the board. If you read our review on the 75DRV5, you’ll see that we had a few issues with regards to the placement of certain components in the system. SOYO seems to have done some good research on this aspect and the layout of components in the board is simply perfect.

The included software bundle hasn’t changed since SOYO started manufacturing the Dragon series, so I believe it’s time they revised this to some extent. The 8-in-1 bonus pack comes with Norton Anti-Virus 2002, Ghost 2002, Adobe ActiveShare, Acrobat Reader, Acrobat eBook Reader, WinDVD 2000, and trials/samples of AutoSave and Imagemore. It’s definitely a great software bundle, with NAV2002 being on top of the list. Maybe it’s just me, but after seeing the same kind of bundle in all the past Dragon boards I just want to see something different. A few games would certainly help too 🙂

In terms of the layout of the board, nothing much has changed from the KT333 Dragon Ultra Motherboard except of course for the silver PCB. The PCB of the board is colored in silver giving the board a very sleek look. The Northbridge has been fitted with an active cooling fan to provide optimum stability for overclocked conditions.

The board supports AMD Socket-A type processors, including AthlonXP, Athlon and Duron (up to 2600+; 2700+/2800+). The CPU socket is well spaced, providing enough room to handle even the largest of coolers. The green headers at the bottom are the USB 2.0 compliant headers where you connect the USB cables coming from the E-box.

The smart card reader pin header is located right below the Bios chip. The two yellow IDE headers are for implementing the RAID function of the board. The board has a built in High-point HPT372 RAID controller and you can RAID up to 4 IDE devices. For the review we didn’t implement RAID since we didn’t have two blank drives of equal size. If you do intend to buy this board, I would highly recommend implementing the RAID feature as the performance benefits are enormous.

The 8x AGP slot also comes with support for AGP Pro based cards. On-board audio is provided by a C-Media 8738 audio chip, which provides 6-channel audio. For the average user, the quality provided by onboard audio is more than adequate. Since SOYO includes the audio card to get digital output users can enjoy 5.1 surround sound at no extra cost. If you’re a true audiophile, then I doubt if this would serve your needs; you cannot expect it to do wonders since that’s something not intended by the manufacture.

The board also includes a VIA 10/100 fast Ethernet adapter providing network connectivity without the need for a separate PCI LAN card. The only thing missing in the board is an onboard firewire connector. Once that’s incorporated, the KT400 Dragon Ultra will provide a total solution in many aspects. The board is totally a jumper-less solution(except for the clear CMOS jumper) and all tweaks and configurations are done through the BIOS.