SOYO introduced probably the most feature-rich VIA KT600-based mainboard, the DRAGON SY-KT600 Ultra Platinum. Until now the vast majority of mainboard makers did not use the latest Socket A chipset from VIA Technologies in their performance mainstream and higher-end products and preferred NVIDIA nForce2 for that purpose. However, SOYO decided to show that the KT600 is still a serious competitor even in the very high-end of AMD Athlon XP market.

SOYO DRAGON SY-KT600 Ultra Platinum supports USB 2.0, Serial ATA-150, AGP Pro 8x, RAID functions, FireWire and even Gigabit Ethernet. Take a look on its specifications:

• Supports all Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processors, including Barton CPUs with 400MHz FSB;
• VIA KT600 chipset with VT8237 I/O Controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC1600, PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM;
• 5 PCI and 1 AGP Pro 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133 controller;
• 2-channel integrated Serial ATA-150 controller with RAID support;
• 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet Adapter from Broadcom;
• 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• Integrated 6-channel CMI 8738 audio solution with S/PDIF connectors;
• Overclocking and tuning functions, including CPU, memory, and AGP voltage adjustments;
• ATX Form-factor.

The Dragon SY-KT600 mainboard will be available in two versions. The SY-KT600 Ultra Platinum will be bundled with SOYO's BayOne AVI PLUS breakout box, which features a combination Flash media reader/writer, two front FireWire ports, and two front USB 2.0 ports.  The bundle also includes a SPDIF audio card, and 8-in-1 software bundle. MSRP is $169. The SY-KT600 Ultra comes with 4-in-1 software bundle and has a MSRP of $99.