Conclusion
SOYO have shown that they know how to present and market a motherboard. Even compared to some of its immediate competition, the KT400 DRAGON Ultra is the one that will most appeal to fans of aesthetics. Apart from the immaculate presentation, the layout of the motherboard is pretty good in its own right too.
Performance was strong for a KT400-based motherboard, generally eclipsing the similarly powered EPoX by a couple of percent in most of our benchmarks. Whether this has more to do with the SOYO's slightly elevated clock speed, or slightly better use of RAM timings, is open to discussion. What we can say, though, is that once in Windows, it is as stable as any other motherboard to pass through the Hexus labs.
What was a little disappointing, however, was the inability to run at 166FSB with the appropriate divider and CPU multiplier selected. It simply refused to boot when setting an XP2400 to 12x166 (2GHz, stock speed). The limiting factor here, quite surprisingly, appears to be this particular chipset, as both AGP/PCI busses and RAM were well within tolerance levels.
Although well featured, I feel a motherboard lacking in either Serial ATA or Firewire connectivity is falling behind the times a little. Those may not be the features that you explicitly want to use right now, but I feel both will have a part to play in '03. The other cloud in the SOYO's blue sky is the imminent widespread release of the much-heralded NVIDIA nForce2 chipset and subsequent motherboards. Preliminary results show it to be a KT400-beater in both performance and specification.
Lastly, whilst this is undeniably a fine motherboard, the factors listed above, and the rather exorbitant price of £165 will deter many from treading the SOYO DRAGON path. Still, if you want a motherboard that's more like a work of art, the SOYO is recommended.
Highs
-
Immaculate presentation
-
Excellent layout
-
Decent features
-
Extremely stable
Lows
-
Maybe not quite as feature-rich as some of the competition
-
Too expensive for most users
-
nForce2 looks like it will put a spanner in VIA KT400's works
Overall rating 8/10.
