Review: SOYO KT333 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition

Due to having the Hexus Thoroughbred sample for a little longer than I expected and having a great set of results from that CPU with the Gigabyte KT333 (GA-7VRXP), I'll be using the XP2200+ with the SOYO too and also putting it up against the 2.4B/Sis645DX/DDR333 combination we've seen in a few reviews recently. The usual MSI Ti4400 GeForce4 for the graphics card and the usual software benchmarks.

Here's a formal rundown.


• SOYO KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition, VIA KT333 Chipset, Socket A AMD DDR Motherboard
• MSI 645E Max2 LRU, SiS645DX Chipset, Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 DDR Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 1.8A 'Northwood' @ 133MHz FSB (2.4GHz, 2.4B effective)
• AMD Athlon XP2200+
• 2 x 256Mb Samsung PC2700 DDR Memory Modules (CAS2, 2-5-2)
• MSI G4Ti4400-VTD (MS-8871) GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB
• Adaptec 39160 PCI SCSI Dual Channel U160 controller
• 2 x 73Gb Seagate Cheetah U160 10,000rpm SCSI disks
• 1 x 18.2Gb Seagate Cheetah U160 15,000rpm SCSI disk
• Plextor 12/10/32S SCSI CDRW
• Pioneer DVD-303 6x Slot-load SCSI DVD
• Creative Soundblaster Audigy Player Retail

• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• NVIDIA DetonatorXP 28.80 drivers
• Aquamark v2.3
• Quake3 v1.30
• 3DMark 2001 Professional Second Edition
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Demo
• Comanche 4 Demo Benchmark
• LAME v3.91 MMX and RazorLame 1.1.5 front end
• OcUK SETI Benchmark (Download)

So lets start with a look at 3DMark 2001 SE and Quake3 for our first indicators of performance on the SOYO and see how it stacks up to the other boards.