Review: SOYO KT333 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition

Let's start with that old benchmarking stalwart, 3DMark 2001 SE. As we know from countless reviews featuring the venerable 3D benchmark, 3DMark 2001 is a full system benchmark with your entire system affecting performance. Let's take a peek at the graph and see how the SOYO does with it's KT333 base and XP2200 heatbeat against the other 2 platforms.



Straight away a 40 point lead over the Gigabyte and a further margin back to the P4 and 645DX solution that brings up the rear. We can attribute that to either variance in the testing conditions (my bet) or some timing nuances in the KT333 chipset that SOYO choose not to expose to the user.

A healthy start for the review board although nothing to shout about, not yet anyway. 40 points difference when all systems are comfortably over 10,000 points is classed as identical benchmark performance in this reviewers eyes.

Onto Quake3 to see if that can back up what we just saw with 3DMark 2001 SE.



It was never really going to beat the Pentium 4 based system in this test, especially if you hark back to the XP2200 review where the Gigabyte/XP2200 and P4 numbers are taken from. But it does match the Gigabyte almost perfectly, something we should expect since to all intents and purposes the boards will perform identically and it's features that will differentiate the two.

So a strong first couple of benchmarks for the SOYO and good performance. Onto a look at 2 more 3D based benchmarks, Comanche 4 and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.