Review: SOYO KT333 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition

We last looked at a SOYO DRAGON board some time ago when they were still the domain of AMD users. We took a look at the KT266 version and found it unremarkable performance wise but full of features. Soon after followed the KT266A version which fixed the performance issues and made it one of the best Socket A motherboards money could buy and my favourite AMD board at the time.

Jump forward to today and the DRAGON series also features for Pentium 4 users with the P4I Fire DRAGON being a particularly full featured Intel board and one for your shortlist. So with the recent release of VIA's KT333 chipset supporting DDR333 memory at 133MHz front side bus, you'd expect SOYO to move their AMD DRAGON product to the new chipset. They didn't disappoint! There are three versions of the KT333 DRAGON to pick up, the DRAGON Lite, the DRAGON Ultra on a black PCB and the DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition that I'm taking a look at today.

Before I talk about the boards themselves, familiarise yourself with the older DRAGON boards if you need to by taking a look here at my review of the older KT266 version which looks at the features you can expect to find on a DRAGON board from SOYO.

So apart from the upgrade to VIA's KT333 core logic, what is new on the KT333 DRAGON for it to earn the Ultra moniker and what about the Platinum Edition tag too? Sounds like a pretty special motherboard so lets take a closer look.