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AMDReview Site News!
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There are 5 parts to this
review, please use the pulldown below to browse sections or simply hit "Next"
at the bottom of each section to continue
Aesthetics
As
you can see from the picture, this is a very attractive motherboard that just
begs to be shown off. Here's a picture of the inside of my case, to show how good
it looks in actual use:
 My
next project is going to be tidying up the power cables inside my case. If I
can get that done, I'm going to reward myself by putting a window in the side
of my case, along with either a Lazer LED or cold cathode to show off the inside
of my system in all it's glory. I enjoyed the look of the Dragon Plus board
I had previously, but keeping this board hidden inside of my case almost seems
like a sin.
System Configuration and Performance
On top of looking good, this board also offers very good performance. It didn't
exactly blow away my KT266A based Dragon Plus board, but then the KT333 chipset
is an incremental upgrade. So lets take a look at our system's setup and a few
benchmarks to see the performance of the KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition compared
to the K7V Dragon Plus.
AMD AthlonXP 1900+
Soyo K7V Dragon Plus
Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum Edition
512MB Corsair XMS PC3200 DDR RAM
Seagate 40GB 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive
Gainward PowerPack! Ultra / 700 XP (Ti4400) 128MB
Compaq P900 19" Trinitron monitor
Onboard Cmedia sound and onboard LAN
Asus 52X CDROM
VIA 4.37a 4in1 drivers
Nvidia 28.32 drivers
Windows 2000 Professional SP2
Note: I used the 2ba3 BIOS for the Dragon Plus, while the Dragon Ultra Platinum
is using a beta BIOS (2AP1R+) that offers improved performance over the BIOS
that ships with the retail version of the board. We're currently hosting this
BIOS for download at AthlonXP.com, so anyone with this board can try it out.
This Beta BIOS works with the Dragon Ultra and Platinum versions of the board.
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| Market Watch |
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| -CPU AMD
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| 2600+ and below | |
| 2700+ and above | |
| AMD MP | |
| Opteron | |
| Athlon 64 | |
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| -CPU Intel
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| P4/XE 2.4 & up | |
| P4/XE 2.2 & down | |
| Celeron | |
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| -Memory DDR | |
| -Memory pc133 | |
-Hard Drive IDE
(60G and lower) | |
-Hard Drive IDE
(80G and higher) | |
| -CD/DVD/CDRWs | |
| -nVidia video cards | |
| ATI video cards | |
| -LCD monitors: 15in | |
| -LCD monitors: 17in | |
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AMD Motherboards
XP:nForce2,VIA KT600
Opteron: nForce3, AMD8000
64: nForce3, AMD8000, K8T
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Intel Motherboards
Latest Chipset: 875P
w/Graphics: 865G
VIA: P4X
ATI: 9100 IGP
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