(hello boards post)Soyo Dragon+

Well, I'm on my way to joining the ranks of all you overclockers, and my Duron 750's real excited about some new neighbors, and a possible overhaul. I have just a couple questions I wanted to ask whoever might be interested in answering: The Soyo K7V Dragon "seems like" an excellent socket A mobo, but it also seems a bit too good for the money. Onboard RAID 0 and 1; up to 3gb DDR sdram; plenty of OC friendly features built into the bios; onboard 5.1 sound with optical and s/pdif out; 2 AGP Pro ports; onboard 10/100 ethernet port. I'm curious, is there something fatally bad about this board or something?? I've shopped around and have seen this mobo for as low as 140.00 on mail order sites. It seems really cheap for an extremely decked out board. If anyone has real-world good or bad advice about this board I'd appreciate it, or if anyone has any recommendations I'd appreciate those too. Talk to you all soon,

Yours truly,
Newbie to the forum,
Nobunaga

The prices that you are seeing are for the original Dragon mobo. It uses VIA's KT266 chipset. This board is soon to be replaced by the Dragon PLUS mobo that incorporates the KT266A. I'm sure the older boards are being clearanced out in advance of the newer board's release.

The new KT266A board fixes a few bugs (notably, USB problems when FSB o/c'ing). But mainly, it VASTLY improves memory performance over every other chipset now available and has even reviewed to be slightly better than nVidia's new nForce based mobos. Personally, I'm waiting for the Dragon PLUS. Representatives at Soyo have informed me that the new board will be available near the end of October.

Oh, yeah--the new board will INCLUDE a smart card reader (and one card). It should fit into a 5.25" drive bay.

Smart card reader, too!!? Damn, and here I thought my Soyo Dragon had it all...I so want the plus...almost want to fry my motherboard just so I have the excuse!!!

ive heard that they are stable but the other ones will squeze more out of your hardware..