Six Athlon Boards With The KT600 Chipset

Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra: Luxurious Features For A Higher Price

Board-Revision 1.0

Bios K7VX6-4AP1R (07/28/2003)

The packaging for the Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra

A first glance, the board looks like a Soltek brand. In the past, the manufacturer used a beige-colored PCB layout. At $164 (€149), the KT600 Dragon Ultra is the most expensive of the test candidates. For that price, it comes with extensive equipment that besides for FireWire, an AGP Pro slot, RAID controller for Serial ATA including additional connections includes further accessories. The unique point about many KT600 mainboards is the Broadcom Gigabit LAN chip that only MSI has in this test lineup. Soyo equips its Northbridge with an active fan that should guard against thermal problems arising during overclocking. To this end, the ergonomics could be improved further by the addition of an integrated fan regulator. The ex works FSB speed is set at 203 MHz (the Athlon XP 3200+ runs at 233 MHz, a fact that quickly becomes evident in the separate benchmarks. Despite that, Soyo does not make the top place in the performance rankings.

A glance at the connections