The Soyo Dragon+ board is quite nice. After a quick update of the BIOS I was off to the races.
Setting up the CPU a painless task as it's all done in the BIOS, just throw in your FSB setting and you are good to go. What I found to be interesting is that Sandra reported that my FSB was set too high for my CPU. It recognizes the XP 1900+ correctly, however, and also gives it's own PR rating of 2183.
The Dragon+ comes with hardware 6 channel sound from C-Media. I haven't tested it in it's 5.1 configuration yet (need an amp for my sub), but for 2 channel sound, it sounds as good as my SB Live! for music/dvd's, and games.
The board also comes with integrated LAN, not much to say about it except that it works.
One nice feature of the board is the Promise RAID controller that allows for it to be used as a standard IDE controller thus allowing a total of 8 IDE devices to be installed.
Also included in my upgrade was the PNY Geforce 3 ti 500. While a nice board (hey, it even matches the black PCB of the Dragon+), PNY could have managed to ship it with a more recent version of the drivers as the Disk contained Detonator 15.20!!! The card also came with a set of very cheap stereoscopic 3d glasses. Can't comment if they actually work because Nvidia doesn't support them in anything other than a Win9x flavor operating system. No big shakes though, I didn't get the board for the glasses, but instead it was the price that buttered my muffin: $289 at a local mom & pop retailer. Not too shabby.
I attached a Thermalright SK-6 heatsink to the CPU and away I went. One note, the SK-6 I purchased came with a Delta 38 fan. While this fan is quite powerful, my god is it loud!!! My Hoover Wind Tunnel vacuum seems quieter, it actually scared the freakin' cat!!! Since I'm really not going to overclock, I just took a ride on over to Crazy PC and picked up a much quieter 23.5 CFM Sunon fan. Ahhhhh, much better now........here kitty kitty!!!!
So far, so good as far as stability is concerned. Looped the 3d Mark 2001 demo overnight and it was still running by morning. Oh yeah, at 1024x768x32 the new setup scored over 8000 3d marks--everything clocked bone stock.