SOYO-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Motherboard (Platinum Edition)

The board uses a 2MB AWARD Flash Bios. The BIOS incorporates features every overclocker dreams of. Going into the SOYO COMBO SETUP menu you’re offered a number of tweaking options. First off, the CPU frequency can be incremented in 1MHz stepping, which ranges from 100MHz to 255MHz giving ample room for overclockers to play from. Next up is a very useful feature when it comes to overclocking. It’s the CPU to PCI Divider. This option determines how fast your PCI Bridge works. When you overclock your CPU the PCI Bridge frequency goes up as well, and the higher you overclock, higher the PCI frequency going to be. This is one of the main causes for instability issues when overclocking. Generally the PCI Bridge works on a 33MHz frequency and when you increase the CPU frequency the PCI bus goes up, making your PCI devices to work at unstable levels. The board offers 3, 4 and 5 CPU to PCI dividers so say for example you increase the board’s FSB to 150MHz from 100MHz, without the CPU divider option your PCI Bridge will now work at 50MHz. By changing the divider to 4, we can bring it back down to 37 MHz. This is the general idea of this option, and it’s a most welcome feature which we hadn’t seen in former releases of the Dragon boards.

The DRAM Timing option allows you to set the speed of your Memory, and it’s nice to see SOYO has included 200MHz allowing users to make use of 400MHz DDR memory. (Just so that you know, 166 = 333MHz DDR, 200 = 400MHz DDR).

The CPU Ratio selection option allows us to select from 3x – 18x with .5x increments. Furthermore there are options to change the CPU voltage, VCore voltage and even the AGP voltage.

The Advanced Tune-Up Settlings menu didn’t offer anything new other than the usual memory tweaking options.

The next interesting feature is in the PC Health Status menu. In addition to the Fan Off Control feature (FOC) SOYO has implemented a new feature called “Anti Burn Regulator” (ABR) which is pretty much the same as the “Anti Burn Shield” feature on the Soltek 75DRV5 we looked at a few weeks back. ABR works hand in hand with the CPU’s internal sensor in monitoring the temperature of the CPU and prevent it from overheating. Once the heat accumulated in the CPU is over the set limit, ABR will automatically shut down the system and warns you with a continuous high pitched beeping sound.