Soyo's SYCK8 Dragon Plus Motherboard

Soyo's SY-CK8 Dragon Plus Motherboard
A New Enthusiast Board for the Athlon 64

By: Jeff Bouton
January 29, 2004

If all goes as planned for AMD, 2004 will be the year of the Athlon 64.  They gave us a taste of their new product line in the last quarter of 2003, with a limited supply of Athlon 64 and Opteron processors hitting store shelves.  The performance of their new line was impressive, although limited supplies resulted in high retail costs, keeping some users from make the change.  Once 2004 hit, AMD started moving forward by increasing production and adding two new models to the Athlon 64 product line, namely the Athlon 64 3000+ and 3400+, thereby making a number of options available. 

While the benefits to 64-bit computing are hampered by the lack of a common 64-bit OS, and 64-Bit applications to take advantage of the added capabilities, the performance of these processors running 32-Bit applications have proven to be quite competitive.  When we pit the Athlon 64 versus the best Intel has to offer, the Athlon 64 performed exceptionally well.  This leaves us with a processor that offers solid performance now, with room to grow when 64-bit Windows is released later this year.

When it comes to the chipsets driving the Athlon 64, VIA and NVIDIA are the major players, with VIA enjoying success with the K8T800.  But users should not discount NVIDIA?s nForce3 150, whose single chip design is both efficient and powerful.  Back in October of 2003 we had a look at several K8T800 boards compared to an nForce3 150, and the nForce3 was a front runner in a good portion of the tests.

The latest nForce3 150 motherboard comes to us by way of Soyo and their SY-CK8 Dragon Plus.  Let?s take a look at the product specifications and see what the SY-CK8 Dragon Plus has to offer.
 

Features of the Soyo SY-CK8 Dragon Plus Features and Functionality

The Bundle:

The SY-CK8 boasts a healthy feature set and a bundle that covers all of the essentials.  The retail package includes the standard components for getting the system up and running smoothly.  A simple Quick Start Guide is the only printed material to accompany the board and manages to cover most of the bases, although a BIOS section was completely missing.  A Drivers CD is provided which includes essential Chipset, Video and LAN drivers, although it is always best to download the latest available from the manufacturer?s website just before installing a new piece of hardware. 

Click to Enlarge

Soyo also includes a Bonus 8-in-1 CD which includes copies of Norton Antivirus 2003, Ghost 2003 and Personal Firewall 2003 to name a few.  The package included a single Floppy Disk Cable, 80-pin IDE cable and S-ATA cable for connecting any combination of drives to the motherboard, although we would have preferred to see an additional SATA and/or IDE cable.  Lastly, a custom I/O shield is provided to ensure the motherboards external connectors are easily accessible from the rear of the case.