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A note about the
performance testing of the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra
motherboard. When this motherboard first came onto
the market, a number of reputable publications reported
that the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra was a bit slower than the
competition. In fact, once we completed our tests, we
saw a consistent trend of the Dragon not quite keeping up
with the Abit KX7-333R in most of the tests we performed.
So instead of simply posting our findings, we thought we
would ask the people at Soyo about this situation.
After speaking with their technical department, they
explained that they have already begun to address this issue
with a future BIOS update. Eager to prove that they
were serious about this, they provided us with a BIOS that is a "Release Candidate"
for a future update. So in this
review you will see two sets of scores in each of the
benchmarks, one with the current release BIOS and one with the
"Release Candidate." This will help to show what the Dragon Ultra can
do now and what we can look forward when the next BIOS update
is released.
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Benchmarks
and Comparisons |
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OpenGL & DirectX |
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Quake 3:
To start things off, we always
like to run a pass of the Quake 3 Timedemo "DEMO001" to show
the CPU limit of a system. To do this, we set the
graphics settings to 640x480x16 at the "Fastest" setting.
This helps to minimize the effect the video card would have
on a score since it would not be stressed in any way.
This all but isolates the test to the CPU itself.
At first the score was a bit
poor in comparison to the Abit board, however, once we
updated to the new RC-BIOS, the Dragon leapt ahead of the
KX7-333R by a margin of 7.9FPS. Once we overclocked the system, we were able to increase the score
by an additional 25.5FPS, topping out at 287.5FPS.
From what we're seeing here, it looks like a lot of people
are going to appreciate the new BIOS Soyo has put together,
as long as it doesn't change too much from the version we
got to test.
Now we'll let the Dragon take a
couple of runs at MadOnion's 3DMark2001SE.
Direct X with MadOnion's 3DMark2001:
With 3DMark2001SE, we ran the
benchmark at the default settings, varying only the
resolution, in this case, 800x600x32 and 1024x768x32.
As we've continued to see, the
Soyo lagged being the Abit system while using the current
BIOS, although at 800x600, it was a minor lag. With
the updated BIOS the score increased 4.1%, but could quite
top the KX7-333R. With a little overclocking, the Soyo Dragon Ultra was able to tack on
another 905 points, hitting a peak of 12528.
Now let's see what happens at
1024x768x32.
Here we see a similar pattern,
although the gains are not as drastic. This time
around, with the new BIOS installed, the score increased
over the original by 373 points, a gain of 3.5%. Once we overclocked the board, we were able to increase the score an
additional 636 points, a much greater gain over the 800x600
test. All in all, the Soyo Dragon Ultra posted good
scores with the current release BIOS and even better scores
with the Release Candidate installed.
What do you say we continue this
fun with MadOnion's PCMark2002Pro and see what gains could
be found there?
MadOnion's PCMark2002Pro
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