Conclusion
The Soyo KT400 is an excellent motherboard, and with a manufacturer as highly regarded as Soyo we have come to expect nothing less. With a superb feature set, great performance and the proven reliability of the VIA chipsets, the KT400 Dragon is a solid continuation of this now legendary line of boards. I think however, that if Soyo is to continue to be successful in this now competitive multi-feature market, which they previously ruled so easily, they will have to look at integrating yet more quality peripherals onto the motherboard, now that makes such as Asus and Abit providing cheaper solutions with an equivalent amount of 'stuff' crammed onto the PCB. Some may question my decision not to give the KT400 board an award, but I think there are faster alternatives coming just around the corner, such as Soyo's own KT400A chipset solution! One thing to bare in mind is that I have found the new nVidia nForce2 chipset based mobos here as finicky as they are fast, being especially choosy with what memory they work well (or at all) with.
Highs:
- Great stability
- All the memory tweaks imaginable
- Great Build Quality
- Good performance
- Multiplier and incremental FSB settings
- Still the best onboard Audio and NIC
- RAID, optional SATA controllers
- The best manual I have seen
- USB 2.0 Support
- Silver, and lots of extras
Lows:
- Not the cheapest AMD solution out there
- Overclocking on the Epox is better
- Nforce2 boards are undeniably faster
- No SATA as standard
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Get the lowest price (May 2003: $125) on Pricegrabber.com.
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