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The past weeks have seen every other manufacturer entering the VIA KT400 arena. Initial claims regarding performance boosts of DDR400 over DDR333 were dispelled rather quickly and by now it is rather clear that the synchronous operation of memory and front side bus yields the best system performance. In the wake of the chipset launch, the usual battle for market share sees some heavy competition between the different mainboard manufacturers. Everybody throws in something to offset themselves from the crowd. In a time where everybody tries to come faster to market than the rest of the field, how mature are the boards? Soyo has been one of the first players in the KT400 scene with the KT400 DRAGON Ultra. Does that mean that they had the least time to debug their board? And what about performance and reliability. The usual questions, and we have some usual and some unusual answers, even regarding DBI for AGP 8X.

Some mainboard manufacturers appear to be doing better than some others. Soyo falls into the first category and quite a bit of this may have to do with looks. Profane silver solder masks of the PCB are out, platinum is in and the necessary accents are set by purple, green and yellow expansion slots and boxed connectors. Add the DRAGON acronym to create a brand awareness and display the boards in every electronics super-warehouse like Fry's and the cohorts of innocent bypassers will be imprinted to never again wanting anything in their lives featuring a plain old brown PCB.

The magic in the SigmaBox, part of the accessories shipping optional with the KT400 DRAGON Ultra

The magnetism of hardware and software bundles funnels the last undecided into the buying frenzy that is further rewarded with third party rebate coupons for DDR and after spending some pocket change on a window kit the system will be ready to rumble.

The latest and greatest chipset in the Socket A scenario (at least amongst those currently available) is VIA's KT400 featuring support for DDR400 a.k.a. PC3200, AGP 8X for 2 GB bandwidth and VLink 8X for 533 MB potential throughput between the VT 8377 North and VT8235 SouthBridge. The new core logic further natively supports six ports of USB 2.0, audio codices, Ethernet and MC97 modem, each of which use their own dedicated IRQ line without interfering with the standard four interrupts dedicated to the PCI expansion slots. The details of the chipset have been described in our ASUS A7V8X review.

Fashion meets Technology

Take the KT400 chipset, slap it onto a platinum PCB and voila, here comes the new KT400 DRAGON Ultra. Compared to the KT333-based earlier version, the most important difference from a user standpoint is probably the fact that there is no more extra USB2.0 control IC needed. There have been a few issues with the KT400 chipset, particularly with the DDR400 support, likewise, AGP 8X can still be somewhat buggy, depending on the graphics adapter used. How successful was Soyo with their implementation of all those features in the DRAGON Ultra? And what about support for the latest AMD processors? We chased the bugs, we found them, we have some work-arounds but how well will they really work? You'll never know unless .....

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