SUMMARY: Soyo have been rising through the motherboard ranks like a thief in the night. One minute you've never heard of them, the next thing their name is everywhere and it's good things we are hearing about the Taiwanese company. Today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at the feature-packed, KT333 powered Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition motherboard from Soyo for the AMD Athlon platform.
Just a few months after the launch of VIA's KT333 chipset, almost all of the prominent motherboard manufacturers have their KT333 motherboards on sale in retail channels all over the world. When the first benchmark numbers of the KT333 chipset were released, many consumers and reviewers alike were not very impressed. This is simply because the chipset does not provide a tangible performance increase over its predecessor, the KT266A chipset, due to the current AMD Athlon processors not being able to utilise the extra memory bandwidth that the KT333 chipset provides. Nonetheless, it is still a very solid chipset and although owners of KT266A boards will not be motivated to upgrade just yet, the KT333 chipset has proven itself to be a viable solution for those looking to upgrade from slightly older platforms (e.g. AMD760).
We have taken a look at quite a few KT333 based motherboards here at TweakTown in the past. These include: the Abit AT7, the Asus A7V333, the EPoX 8K3A+, the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP and the Soltek 75DRV5. Continuing our KT333 coverage, we have managed to obtain Soyo's KT333 based motherboard, the KT333 Dragon Ultra.
The KT333 Dragon Ultra was actually the third motherboard in Soyo's "Dragon" series, with its predecessors being the K7V Dragon (KT266) and the K7V Dragon Plus (KT266A). Both of these boards gained Soyo quite a good reputation because they offered a wide range of features, high performance and were priced at a fraction of what the competition was charging for their boards based on the same chipset.
Soyo, being ones for adding style to their product have released a new KT333 Dragon board to add to their success - a platinum motherboard. Let’s see if it is as good as it looks.
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