The K7V DRAGON Plus has a fairly clean layout. The only real flaw that I spotted would be the placement of the ATX power header at the upper left portion of the board. The fact that the power supply cable has to run over the CPU may hinder airflow - many manufacturers have moved away from placing the header there. Notice the DRAGON has not 1, 2, or even 3 fan headers - THEY HAVE 5 (One header in the middle is taken by the active cooling placed on the chipset). This is definitely a very nice feature for overclockers since we tend to need a lot of cooling. I myself was able to make use of all 4 remaining headers (2 for CPU cooling, 1 for graphics card, and finally one for the front chassis fan).

The area around the socket may become a little cramped for users of larger coolers because of the cluster of capacitors to its left side. I used the TSHeatronics Radiator Zen cooler (review coming soon!) for my tests. Installing such as large cooler required a bit of bending on the capacitors - if you do this, please take care not to push too hard and break the capacitors off. In the second picture, you get a close up view of the 2 fan headers are located close to the DDR slots. However, in my test, this did not hinder memory installation one bit.

As you can see in the picture here, the bottom of the motherboard has headers to support 4 more USB ports on top of the 2 that are located at the back. For some more pictures, Click Here

Yeah yeah, so how does this board overclock you ask? The DRAGON features lots of sweet overclocking features to help you push your processor to the bleeding edge of performance. The board features FSB adjustments in 1MHz increments up to 233MHz - not that we'll be seeing any processor that will run that speed anytime soon, it's nice to know we can do it anyways. For those with unlocked processors, the board offers jumperless multiplier settings. Voltage adjustments are also available in +/-0.025v increments up to 0.1v from the default voltage. After playing with the Epox 8K7A for a while, it's nice to get nice jumperless settings back. One thing that seemed to be missing from the list of features is voltage adjustments for the DDR memory. For owners of the 8K7A, you probably have taken advantage of the memory voltage adjustments to help with your system stability. On the other hand, the DRAGON more than redeems itself by including a nice Turbo setting that instantly sets a variety you memory, AGP, and chipset settings for optimal performance - no fuss, no muss.

All in all the DRAGON is a extremely stable board. Some of this stability may come from the use of 3 phase voltage regulation. With my 8K7A, I was only able to clock at 1.6GHz (12x133) with questionable stability. From my tests, the DRAGON allowed my trusty Athlon TBird 1.4GHz to clock at 1.63GHz (11.5x142) with 100% stability. Not and easy feat considering how stubborn an overclocker the processor is. Head on over to the test to get an idea of how the board may perform.