Introduction
The Soyo Dragon line of Athlon boards is now in its fourth incarnation (or fifth if you count the KT333 Platinum Edition seperately), and if you look back in our reviews section, you will see that they typically do very well. Today we are looking at the KT400 Platinum Edition, unsurprisingly based upon VIA's KT400 chipset. To be honest, the KT333 showed little improvement over its KT266A brother in terms of performance, due to the Athlon's bus (at that time) stagnating at 266MHz. The KT400 however, has an advantage in that it officially supports the new 333MHz FSB Athlons. Whilst quite a few KT333 boards also are able to support these new CPUs, Soyo's previous generation of DRAGON certainly cannot due to its curious lack of a 1/5 divider.
As always the KT400 comes in a behemoth of a box chocked to the gills with goodies. Inside the box in addition to the super-attractive silver motherboard, you also get 2 CDs (one for drivers, the other is an 8-in-1 bonus disk containing Norton Anti-Virus 2002, Norton Ghost 2002, Adobe ActiveShare, Acrobat Reader, Acrobat eBook Reader, WinDVD 2000, and some trial software). A nice touch is the inclusion of a 3.5" (or 5.25" with supplied adaptor) Compact Flash/Smart Media reader/writer called the "Sigma Box". All the usual Dragon extras are still present and correct, such as 3 ATA 133 cables, an external audio bracket and the most comprehensive instruction book you are ever likely to find.
The Soyo Dragon KT400 can currently be bought from Chillblast at a cost of £133. This makes it one of the more expensive models available, so let's see if it is worth the extra cash!
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