VIA KT333 Motherboard Roundup - June 2002

Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra

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Soyo has definitely taken the right steps with their past few motherboard releases to complete the transition from a manufacturer that was rarely talked about to one of the more popular manufacturers in our community.

Continuing on with their newly found tradition, Soyo released a KT333 based motherboard for their Dragon line of products - the KT333 Dragon Ultra. Soyo also produced a version with a silver/platinum colored PCB; the board is identical to the regular KT333 Dragon Ultra in every way other than the color of the PCB. Soyo claims that the platinum PCB dissipates heat better, but not only is that incredibly difficult for us to validate, it doesn't offer any truly tangible gains.

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The board features 5 PCI slots and an AGP Pro50 slot, which is powered using a 4-pin drive power connector. You'll also find three DIMM slots on the board, all of which can be populated and run at DDR333 speeds without sacrificing stability.

The VIA VT6202 controller provides USB 2.0 support which Soyo takes advantage of using an external bay that installs in either a 3.5" drive bay or a 5.25" bay with an included bracket. This bay provides front USB 2.0 port access for a total of four ports, and it also features a LAN activity light for use with the on-board Ethernet (driven by a Realtek controller). The two USB ports on the board itself are USB 1.1 compliant and are driven by the 8233A South Bridge.

The KT333 Dragon Ultra features a CMedia 8738 6-channel audio controller; Soyo takes advantage of the 6-channel functionality by included two additional 1/8" jacks on a separate bracket along with SPDIF in and out ports (optical & RCA for both).

Bringing the feature set to a close we have the HPT372 controller by High Point that brings RAID functionality to the board. The BIOS offers Thoroughbred support today and the usual overclocking features including 1MHz FSB increments and Core/AGP/DDR voltage control.

The only problem we encountered during our testing of the KT333 Dragon Ultra was that it would not POST with our Audigy card installed. Soyo was surprised when we informed them of this since it was the first time they had heard it; all other PCI cards seem to work fine and our Audigy card worked perfectly fine in all of the other motherboards we tested in this roundup as well. At this point, we're not sure who is at fault for the incompatibility or whether it's limited to our card specifically.

Other than the issue with the Audigy, the KT333 Dragon Ultra performed flawlessly during our testing.