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Overclocking
Overclocking is pretty important nowadays, AMD processors are still overclockable and very good at just that. This board features multiplier adjust, voltage adjust, the FSB adjust, all at very small increments. This is good news because it means precision Overclocking could be done… meaning that you can get the processor to it's maximum. This is where most board stand apart, some boards overclock well, others don't. The original Dragon wasn't a good candidate for Overclocking school but the Dragon Plus certainly was. I lowered the multiplier and cranked up the FSB to 140 for a first shot and it worked, I was surprised at this point since 140 is a high point for me (I don't overclock much). I pushed it up further to 150Mhz and then as high as 155Mhz before it lost stability. 155Mhz is nothing to be ashamed about, it is a pretty impressive overclock. This board is made well to overclock and it does its job well. The only problem is that there is no voltage I/O adjust for the DDR memory, this could be what costs you that extra 5Mhz at the end. Still, keeping stable at that high of a speed is impressive.
Usage And Performance
As with the Dragon, the Dragon Plus was really good in audio and LAN speed as well as the RAID. While these are similar, the performance in memory is not. The memory performance is supposedly a lot better than what I had when I tested but that was with a variety of different operating systems. For all I know, I could test with a PC800 i850 based system and get lower benchmarks on those too. You never know with a new operating system and as we all know, we need to move onto the newest systems. There was one problem though, the temperature of the CPU was higher than normal, not just a bit higher, I mean higher by 10 degrees C. When I tested the same CPU in a KT133A based board, the temperature of the CPU when idle was 38 degrees with a Thermoengine but it was 48 degrees idle on both the Dragon and Dragon Plus. I'm not sure if this is an isolated problem or not but it is a big problem, especially with systems that run hot by nature. Although 48 degrees is well within spec for Thunderbirds, I'd rather not take the risk so upgrading to a better heatsink is in the future for me.
On the positive side, the Dragon Plus remains as one of the most stable boards I have ever tested. When running the stability test, it only froze once in 3 days, which is amazing to say the least. While running Windows XP with normal usage, it never froze on me once. I cannot say how stable it is in Windows 98 and ME but it is also very stable in Windows 2000. When most people think "integrated", they think of mediocre video and sound put into motherboards to spruce up the specs. Soyo has gone beyond that by adding premium audio, as well as RAID, and LAN to make this a motherboard with integrated features that you will actually use. I would recommend using the onboard audio over outside audio because of the cheaper cost and the great quality of the CMI chipset. As for everything else on the board, it is designed with the Athlon XP, DDR SDRAM, AGP Pro, and RAID in mind. This means that this board will not be obsolete for a very long time.
>> Pros & Cons/Conclusion
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