Features
Here is Soyo's official feature list, stolen straight from their site.
FEATURES
- DDR SDRAM
- RAID controller on board (optional Serial ATA)
- Audio on board, with 6-chanel Hardware Audio
- Graphic, Universal AGP Pro slot with 8x AGP
- Overclocking, setup FSB by 1MHz increment
- Network, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
PROCESSOR
- Supports AMD Socket-A type Processor, including Duron & Athlon & XP CPUs
CHIPSET
- VIA KT-400
SYSTEM MEMORY
- Three 184-pin DDR SDRAM 2.5V DIMM sockets with support for up to 3GB DDR400/333
EXPANSION SLOTS
Five 32-bit Bus Mastering PCI slots (V2.2 compliant) and one Universal AGP Pro slot (support 1x/2x/4x/8x mode)
ON BOARD AUDIO SUBSYSTEM
- On board CMI 8738 Audio chip to provide 6 channels audio solution
- Supports optical output & SPDIF output
ON BOARD ULTRA I/O CHIP
- Two RS-232 Serial Ports (16550 UART compatible)
- One Parallel Printer Port (SPP/EPP/ECP mode)
- One FDD port (supports 3 mode, 1.2/1.44/2.88 MB FDD)
- Provides IrDA port with optional cable for transceiver
- Provides 4 USB 2.0 ports (2 rear, 2 front)
ULTRA DMA IDE PORTS
- Four independent channels for eight IDE devices (two for Raid)
- Supports up to PIO mode 5 & UDMA 33/66/100
- Two PCI bus mastering ATA E-IDE ports
BOOT-BLOCK FLASH BIOS
- Award PCI BIOS with ACPI function
- Supports multiple-boot from E-IDE/SCSI/CD-ROM/FDD LS120/ZIP
- 2M byte Flash ROM
BOARD DIMENSIONS
- Four Layer PCB, 30.5cm x 23cm(12" x 9.05")
- ATX form factor
ENHANCED PC HEALTH MONITORING
- On-board voltage monitors for +3.3, +5V, +12V, Vcore,(TBD)
- CPU fan speed monitor (TBD)
- CPU temperature monitoring through flexible thermal sensor (TBD)
- CPU overheating protection
DOUBLE STACK BACK-PANEL I/O CONNECTORS
- PS/2 Mini-DIN mouse & keyboard ports
- 2 USB ports
- One RJ45 connector
- Two D-Sub 9-pin male serial port
- One D-Sub 25-pin female printer port
- Audio I/O: LINE-OUT x1, LINE-IN x1, MIC JACK x1
- One Game port
AGP Pro
The Dragon Ultra features full AGP Pro capability, including the ability to add an extra 12V of juice for particularly power-hungry AGP cards. Notice the lack of an AGP retention mechanism on the AGP slot, which might be an issue to box-builders wanting to send completed systems through the post. With this KT400 edition, Soyo adds full AGP 8x functionality as demanded by the new GeForce and Radeon cards. Does 8x AGP provide a performance boost? No is the answer - at this moment it is purely a gimmick as nothing requires even the full 1.05GB/s 4x AGP throughput let alone 8x. 
Northbridge Cooler
As with the previous KT333 Platinum, Soyo have included active Northbridge cooling to aid overclocking, and this attractive clear fan sits on top of a slim, but solid Northbridge heat sink. Perhaps a passive solution is overdue now.
USB 2.0
The new USB 2.0 standard features a maximum transfer rate of a whopping 480Mbps and backwards-compatibility with the existing USB 1.1 standard. USB 2.0 is pretty much standard on all boards these days, and it rapidly becoming the dominant external connectivity standard.
Integrated LAN
The KT400 Ultra's integrated network adaptor is provided by a Davicom controller. Sandra Network benchmarks put it slightly ahead of the Realtek controller used in the KT333 in terms of speed, although it's within the benchmarks margin for error. The RJ45 socket helpfully glows yellow when nothing is plugged in, allowing for simple visualisation, and changes to green when a lead is plugged in.
Integrated Sound
The Soyo Dragons Integrated sound chip is excellent, and much better than the AC97 you find on most motherboards (take note Abit - your 6 channel AC97 audio is rubbish!). Most solutions of this kind have sub-SoundBlaster 128 capability and sound distinctly tinny or crackly. Based on the CMI 8738 chipset, this soundcard offers true SoundBlaster Live quality. It supports 5.1 surround sound speakers, DLS wave table music and a professional class SPDIF IN/OUT digital interface. Completing the feature set is a pair of optical inputs/outputs for use with minidisk players. Gamers are well catered for with both Direct Sound 3D & A3D support, but no EAX unfortunately. Another complaint is that the microphone gain is a bit quiet.
On-Board RAID
An acronym for "Redundant Array of Independent Drives", RAID is a method of using multiple hard drives to either increase performance or reliability of a given system. The Highpoint chip on the Soyo is based on the HighPoint 372 Lite Controller, and supports ATA133 disks in either RAID 0 (Striping) or RAID 1 (Mirroring) or RAID 0+1 (mirroring+striping). Disk striping provided a dramatic increase in drive speed (Around 95% better performance under sustained data transfers), whilst also utilising all the available space on the hard drives (assuming they are the same size). Mismatched hard disks can be used, although the maximum capacity is defined as the space on the smallest drive in the array multiplied by the number of drives. Mirroring offers a little improvement in drive performance thanks to load balancing, and copies an exact image of the data from one drive onto the other, thus if your main drive should fail, you have a perfect back up until the sick disk in the array is replaced.
Setting up the RAID array with dual Maxtor D740X ATA133 drives was simple, with the BIOS taking you through the configuration step by step. If you need more, then a Highpoint manual is included. Benchmarking the RAID setup recorded excellent results, with the ATA133 helping the Maxtors to a superb Sandra result of 41494.
Sigma Box
The KT400 platinum features two USB 2.0 ports and a Compact Flash / Microdrive / Smartcard reader. Fitting into a floppy bay (or a CD-ROM bay with the supplied adaptor), this gadget allows you to read the photos / mp3s etc. on your media directly from Windows Explorer as a removable drive. This is a great feature for those of you into Digital photography, with the two major formats being supported right out of the box.
A very helpful inclusion to the KT400 Dragon is CPU overheating protection. I was brave (foolish) enough to try this out and attempted to start the machine with no heatsink. Sure enough it shuts down after a fraction of a second. This is far superior to the Fan-off-control protection provided by the previous Dragon which only protected the user from rotary unit failure and not heatsink detatchment.
With the KT 400 chipset, the Dragon now supports PC3200 memory as well as PC2700, and it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference this time. Those of you with good memories (or who read enough online reviews!) will recall that the KT333 saw little or no benefit from running memory at 333MHz with the FSB at 266MHz simply because even if the memory can supply 2700mb/s if the CPU bus can only supply 2100MB/s, the memory will just be waiting for the CPU to catch up in many circumstances.
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