SOYO-KT600 DRAGON Ultra Motherboard (Platinum Edition)

The South bridge of KT600 boards as mentioned before is one of the most advanced currently in the market. As seen in the picture below, SOYO has included a heatsink to the south bridge as well. This’ll be very useful under overclocked conditions.

Like most other high-end boards in the market today SOYO has decided to include a Gigabit Ethernet controller. This support is provided through a Broadcom 10 /100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet controller. Since SOYO seems to be aiming this board at the mainstream users such as in server environments, it’s likely that they’ll make use of this additional performance offered. For home users this additional performance is unlikely to be of any real use. Nevertheless it’s very nice to see SOYO deciding to go with such a solution.

The board provides onboard audio through a CMedia CMI 8738 PCI 6 channel audio chip. There’s nothing extremely flashy about this chip accept for that fact that it provides decent 5.1 surround sound. SOYO also includes an audio expansion card which provides two sets of S/PDIF inputs and outputs, one for RCA connectors and the other for optical connectors which provides better audio quality.

It would have been nice to see SOYO making use of the new Vynyl Audio technology offered by the board’s South Bridge; they may decide on incorporating this in later models to come out.

The rear panel of the board consists of four USB ports as opposed to two ports commonly seen. Furthermore, an IEEE 1394(Firewire) port is also included, making a total of two firewire ports in all.

The spacing around the CPU socket has also been improved with more room for larger heatsinks.

Another new addition to the KT600 dragon ultra in contrast to its former versions is that SOYO has incorporated a DIP Switch for changing the Multiplier of your CPU. (Provided it’s unlocked of course). You can change the FSB through the BIOS in 1MHz increments. Furthermore a CPU to PCI divider (3/4/5) has been set into the BIOS for greater overclocking flexibility.

The bundle included with the board has also been slightly improved and among the important software includes Norton Anti virus 2003, Ghost 2003 and Personal Firewall 2003. That’s a couple of hundred dollars worth of software, so it’s certainly a good deal.

Okay, it’s time to see how this board performs.