Soyo Dragon KT400
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
Of all the KT333 motherboards, the Soyo Dragon KT333 motherboard has probably received the most press. Its color and large set of features have made it one of the best available on that chipset and Soyo would like to continue that through with the KT400 version of the motherboard.Soyo motherboards have always had one of the most well-rounded layouts and feature sets of the Athlon platform. The processor socket on the board is a bit cramped but Soyo has left a gap in the capacitors on the left side of the socket to allow for some moderately sized heatsinks to be installed safely. They also kept the four the mounting holes on the motherboard to keep the hardcore overclockers happy.
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The 3 DIMM slots on the board are located way to close to the processor socket. In order to remove the heatsink or install it, all the memory had to be removed from the system. While it isn’t a huge deal, it is definitely something that I would label as an annoyance. The north bridge is cooled by a heatsink and fan keeping the temperature low for overclocking potential. The ATX power connector is located near the external connectors, keeping it out of the way of the rest of the components.
The Soyo Dragon KT400 has IDE RAID powered by the HPT 372 chipset. The RAID IDE ports are located at the far bottom of the board with the floppy connector, leaving the primary and secondary IDE ports near the top. The Soyo KT400 board is the only one reviewed here to offer an AGP Pro slot along with a corresponding 4-pin power connector for feeding power to starved AGP cards. Below that are five purple colored PCI slots.
As for features, the Soyo board doesn’t disappoint. I already mentioned that they have IDE RAID on-board, but the Dragon KT400 also includes 6 USB 2.0 ports, Smartcard reader ports, SPDIF audio out with 6-channel audio support as well as an on-board 10/100 network adaptor.
Soyo has included a good overclocking bios with lots of options in their “Soyo Combo Feature” menu. In there you can adjust the FSB, multiplier, Vagp, Vmem, Vcore and all the memory settings you could hope for. Everything is clearly setup and easy to use. The multiplier “trick” does work on the Soyo Dragon KT400 Ultra motherboard, which adds even more benefit to the overclocking features of the board.
