questions about the Soyo K7VDragon Plus!

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I am looking into upgrading my system, and am just as confused as hell. KT266A, KT333, KT400A, nForce 415-D, where does it end? As you can probaly tell, I will most likely be getting an Athlon 1800+ XP processor, as they are just in my price range. I am mainly looking for great gaming performance, something that will match up well with the GeForce4 Ti4400 I have currently. The main questions I have about the Dragon Plus is about the onboard LAN and sound.

One of worst aspects of my current system is the lack of a good sound card. I currently have a Sound Blaster PCI128, which I know is eating up too much of the CPU. I have heard that the Audigy will take most this load off, giving more processing power to the AI and other good stuff. But I'm trying to be as cost effective as I can, so my question is this. Is the sound onboard the Dragon Plus just as good as taking off processor load as an Audigy? Or is atleast a lot better than what I currently have?

The other question is about the onboard LAN. This may be a stupid question, but I'm confused about it. Does this act as a regular 10/100 NIC? Can I plug my DSL modem in it and it work just as good as my PCI NIC I have now? Thanks for your replies in advance.

 

[Boonesmi]

all onboard sound will use some of your cpu cycles, but... with an athlonxp 1800+ the amount used by onboard sound is totally insignificant (maybe if you had a 100mhz pent1 it might be an issue )

and yes the onboard LAN is basically 10/100 nic that is on the board instead of in a pci slot

hehe as for kt266a/kt300/kt400 well something new is always just coming out, and something even newer is always just around the corner

kt266a is very fast/stable chipset.. the kt333 is a little faster (but just a little) even when using pc2100 ram, (but kt333 supports the faster ddr333)
kt333 also has a couple other features the kt266a doesnt have like ata133 support

but the kt333 isnt as mature as the kt266a and so there may still be some bugs to work out

kt400 should be a good chipset also with AGP 8x, 533MB/sec V-Link, USB 2.0 and DDR400 memory


personally if i was buying a board right now the soyo dragon+ would be one of the few at the top of my list