Installation
The Dragon Plus measures 12 inches by 9.05 inches. There are a couple of nice touches here compared to other motherboards. First, the socket is turned sideways compared to other boards, which means that the retention mechanism for the heatsink will run perpendicular to the DIMM sockets. This is a plus, because it gives you more room to work. Many boards mount their sockets near the edge of the board, aligned so the "latch" side of the clip is on the edge. In some cases, there is very little clearance between the edge of the board and the bottom of the power supply. We've actually dealt with some case/heatsink combinations that required removal of the power supply to make enough room to remove the heatsink—not a fun proposition.

On the subject of heatsinks, there is a good amount of dead space around the socket, which should allow for fitting some pretty large heatsinks. Of course, the number-one rule still applies: If in doubt, check with the heatsink manufacturer, or order your heatsink and board from the same vendor and verify the fit with them.


Plenty of room between DIMM clips and the AGP slot

One could argue that the placement of the Dragon Plus's power connector isn't very convenient, although it didn't bother me that much. If you don't secure them in any way, the wires from the power connector can get in the way when swapping CPU's or even memory. However, in most cases some quick work with a zip tie or two will keep the wires out of the way of everything. Compared to, say, a floppy connector in the middle of nowhere, it's just not that big a deal.

One final fit note. The Dragon Plus avoids one of our pet peeves here at TR, which is placing the AGP slot and DIMM sockets close enough to each other that the video card interferes with the DIMM clips. There's plenty of clearance there, making memory module swaps as easy as they should be.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. All tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged. Our test systems were configured as follows:

 Epox EP-8KHA+Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus
ProcessorAMD Athlon XP 1800+AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Front-side bus133MHz (266MHz DDR)133MHz (266MHz DDR)
ChipsetVIA KT266AVIA KT266A
North bridgeVT8366A north bridgeVT8366A north bridge
South bridgeVT8233 south bridgeVT8233 south bridge
Memory size256MB (1 DIMM)256MB (1 DIMM)
Memory typePC2100 DDR SDRAM CAS 2PC2100 DDR SDRAM CAS 2
GraphicsNVIDIA GeForce3 64MB (12.41 video drivers)
SoundCreative SoundBlaster Live!
StorageIBM 75GXP 30.5GB 7200RPM ATA/100 hard drive
OSMicrosoft Windows 2000 Professional
OS updatesWindows 2000 Service Pack 2, Direct X 8.0a

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the default or "normal" image quality settings, with the exception that the resolution was set to 640x480 in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.