Soyo KT400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition: Full-Featured KT400

Soyo KT400 DRAGON Ultra: Basic Features

Soyo's KT400 board comes with lots of features in addition to some really neat accessories.

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We'll start off with the onboard RAID chip that's a part of the Soyo KT400 DRAGON Ultra. Soyo decided to opt for the HighPoint 372 chip, which supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 arrays. This chip is actually ATA133 compatible, so you'll be able to take advantage of any ATA133 drives if you like.

Soyo also decided to include a C-Media CMI8738 sound chip. Currently, this is one of the higher quality onboard sound solutions available on the market. In our KT400 roundup, we'll be sure to test the output quality of all KT400-based motherboards with onboard sound. As we did in our KT333 roundup in June, we'll be using RightMark's Audio Analyzer, since we believe it's a very objective way of measuring sound quality, and what to look for in an onboard sound solution like the C-media CMI8738.

One of the most interesting features the KT400 Ultra brings to the table is support for DDR400 memory (3 DIMM slots available). Of course, like most unofficial DDR400 motherboards, there's either very little performance boost, none at all, or even less performance with DDR400 (we'll get into the KT400 Ultra's DDR400 performance later on). As we covered in our ASUS A7V8X and ECS L7VTA reviews, the KT400 chipset also brings AGP 8X to the table. We'll be doing AGP 8X compatibility testing using NVIDIA's new 8X cards as well as the Radeon 9700 and SiS Xabre in an upcoming roundup, so be sure to check back for the results of that comparison.

It's worth mentioning of course that you get native USB 2.0 support with this KT400-based motherboard. Although not a very useful feature, Soyo has implemented a unique color scheme with their KT400 Ultra; the PCB is colored an intriguing silver/platinum color, which is the reason this board is part of Soyo's Platinum Edition series. The 5 PCI slots are colored purple, the RAID connectors are colored yellow (which is norm for RAID connectors currently), and the on-board USB 2.0 headers are colored green.

We also see that Soyo went with active cooling for the KT400 North Bridge. As we mentioned in our KT400 reviews, active cooling isn't the greatest idea if you desire an absolutely silent system with no chance of North Bridge fan failure (OEMs especially don't usually like lots of moving parts, active North Bridge fans included). However, we must concede that active cooling over a North Bridge is a good idea if you're overclocking, as the additional cooling can aid in system stability.

Finally, we have the I/O panel, which includes the usual legacy features (2 parallel ports, 2 serial ports, a Game Port, and 2 PS/2 ports) in addition to 2 USB 2.0 ports and a regular 10/100 Ethernet port.

Another nice accessory Soyo bundles is a Serial ATA riser card. Powered by Marvell's 88i8030 chip, this riser card is able to convert the parallel ports on the motherboard to Serial ATA ports for use with Serial ATA drives. Note that this is not a native Serial ATA interface but instead performs a Parallel-to-Serial translation which will result in some overhead. Soyo claims that there's no performance loss as a result of this but we'll leave that up to our performance tests once Serial ATA drives become readily available.

Thankfully, the Soyo KT400 Ultra also comes with lots of goodies in addition to the solid feature-set we just described. These accessories include a Sigma Box (fits in a 5.25" or 3.5" drive bay, see below) featuring a smart card reader slot and 2 USB 2.0 ports, SPDIF Audio Card, heatsink compound, I/O panel, 3 ATA cables, and extra software (includes Norton AntiVirus 2002, Norton Ghost, Adobe Active Share, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Vcom Autosave, WinDVD, Ewalla Text & Voice Messaging, and Imagemore Photographic Collection). All in all, we got to hand to Soyo, they put together some quality accessories in addition to good software.

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