Introduction
Introduction
The original Soyo Dragon was my favourite KT266 based motherboard, since it offered great performance coupled to a fantastic feature set. This new revision of the board features the updated KT266A chipset, but otherwise remains the same as the original. The VIA Apollo KT266A features an enhanced memory controller, designed with high performance in mind. Supporting DDR200/266 memory, the VIA Apollo KT266A provides lightning fast access to system memory. Timings have been improved vs the KT266, resulting in faster transfers between the synchronized Front Side Bus and Memory Bus. Data queues have been deepened, allowing faster and more efficient access to buffered data. In terms of memory performance only the nVIDIA nFORCE comes close.
The VIA KT266A was designed to be a simple upgrade for motherboard manufacturers; pop out the old one and place the new one in its place. Soyo have taken advantage of this fact, and apart from this chipset change the Dragon looks largely unchanged. The box is the same, the motherboard looks the same and you get the same bundled software.
Included in the box you get:
- The SY-K7V Dragon Motherboard
- The Manual
- Driver and Utilities CD-ROM
- SOYO Bonus CD-ROM
- Three IDE Cables
- One Floppy Cable
- Audio Connector Card
- One Flat Cable for the Audio Card
- Generic White Thermal Goop
- A smart Card Reader
Price:
The Soyo Dragon Plus currently costs £149.99 from Chillblast, which is the only UK distributer of this board as far as I know.
Layout:
The board Layout is exceptionally good, with all of the important bits right where you would hope to find them, i.e. no annoying floppy connectors between PCI slots! My only minor gripe is that the memory slots are a little too close to the CPU socket, making heat sink installation a little cumbersome. Giants such as the Zen CPU Radiator will not fit this board.
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