System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- AMD XP2400+ CPU (133FSB)
- SOYO KT400 DRAGON Platinum Edition (1R BIOS)
- EPoX 8K9A2+ KT400 Motherboard (K9A22A25.BIN BIOS)
- Taisol 760 cooler with twin YSTech fans
- Intel 2.53GHz Northwood CPU
- Iwill P4HT-S i845PE motherboard (run in DDR333 mode)
- Thermaltake S478 cooler
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro (324/320)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR333 for all three motherboards
- 61.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- VIA 4-in-1s, 4.43
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, DivX 4.12 CODEC
- OcUK SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
Unlike the EPoX 8K9A2+, the SOYO KT400 DRAGON refused to run at 166FSB with a lowered multiplier. Therefore, I'll be running it at the CPU's supported 133FSB with a 256MB module of Corsair XMS3200 C3 being run at the strictest possible timings at 166MHz. I've added a 2.53GHz P4 on an i845PE motherboard (166MHz RAM) to see how it all shapes up.
Issues
Initially, I had a great deal of difficulty in getting the motherboard to boot correctly. It would power-up and then switch off within 10 seconds. After leaving for some time it seemed to right itself, although sometimes it still took 10+ seconds for it to finally engage the graphics card. Once in Windows, though, stability was truly excellent throughout all testing. It ran perfectly with 3 different brands of DDR333 memory (Corsair, Mushkin, and Samsung respectively). One of the most solid motherboards I've tested (once it's in Windows).
