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In SOYO terminology, DRAGON stands for the following.
D for DDR memory
R for IDE RAID, in this case RAID 0, 1 and 0+1
A for audio, in this case 6 channel CMI87xx with SPDIF I/O
G for AGP Pro graphics slot
O for overclocking with good volt adjust and front side bus range
N for networking via built in 10/100MBit Ethernet port.
The Ultra part of the moniker is for USB 2.0 with 2 ports on the ATX backplane and 2 on the bundled Sigma Box (more on that soon!).
Finally on this version of the KT333 DRAGON, the Platinum Edition part of the name. Take a look at the following picture of the board for the reason why!
Apologies for the picture, it was taken in poor light and the brightness adjusted but you can clearly see the dramatic silver coloured PCB. Here's a shot from SOYO themselves to illustrate what the above shot doesn't show you.
I was kind of hoping for silver coloured PCI slots too to complete the effect since I think the purple slots spoil the effect and the gaudy IDE and audio headers don't help either. It's a nice touch spoiled by multi coloured components but you can't have it all. It does look nice when installed in a case however and the aluminium backdrop of my case did make it look better than first impressions.
SOYO also claim extra heat dissipation from the silver coloured PCB and I can only imagine that it will reflect heat away from itself more than a darker, less shiny board but I don't think the effect is measurable and there are too many variables to eliminate for me to investigate it further. We'll have to take SOYO's word for it.
Features
As far as features go, DRAGON boards have always been packed. With 5 PCI slots and the wealth of on board features, the possible peripheral configuration on this board is mind boggling.
The audio solution is our favourite onboard solution here at Hexus with the C-Media CMI8738 on audio duty with the supplied silver coloured plate with the rear and subwoofer/center channel outputs along with the SPDIF I/O for optical connections to MiniDisc, AV amp and other optical bearing audio hardware.
RAID is present for the IDE fetishists provided ably by the Highpoint HPT372 giving you ATA133 IDE channels as well as the obvious RAID configurations.
Networking is done using a Realtek 8100B which performs fine and is featured on many a recent motherboard although reports put it among the poorer performers when pushed hard. It's perfect for light use and small home networking configurations.
Everything else is standard on todays motherboards with support for 3GB of DDR via 3 slots and USB 2.0 out of the box.
Sigma Box (SB-K7VXBP)
I mentioned the Sigma Box (SOYO do a few versions, the SB-K7VXBP 4-in-1 features on this board) a bit earlier and it's a cool addition to the board and deserves a dedicated look.
There are similar solutions for other boards (DFI for example ships a similar device with its high end NB76 model) and the Sigma box on the KT333 DRAGON Ultra is a combined Compact Flash and SmartMedia reader and writer and also provides 2 front USB 2.0 ports for connecting to the labelled USB3_4 header on the bottom of the board. Thankfully the connecting cables are of good length for those with bigger cases.
It mounts into a floppy sized bay but you don't get a 5.25 inch face surround for mounting in a CD-ROM sized bay which might disappoint some.
Onto a look at the layout.
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