Need some Soyo Dragon + KT266A Tips

jediphx

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Oct 4, 2000
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ok my other mobo is about to die so im about to install my AMD 1800+ XP into a Dragon + KT266A. I havent had a VIA chipset mobo in some time so I need some pointers, tips, performance tweaks etc. I will be running Win2k pro SP4, unless for this mobo winxp pro is better. I have 512 megs pc2100 and two ata-100 7200rpm Hds. My sound card is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz so I wont use the onboard sound. My vid card is an ATI Radeon 9500 modded to 9700np 128 meg. I have a new 450W PS. HP 9300i CDRW and a new shiny Operite DVD+-RW drive. Fire away :)
 

maluckey

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Jan 31, 2003
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Once you get it up and running, give me a shout, with a question either by E-mail, or to the thread, and I'll share what I know. I have taken three different brands of KT266a to 200 Mhz FSB, so along the way, I learned a few things.

Windows 2000 is fine. Sure, XP is more tweakable, but not necessary. I would however, upgrade to a high quality PC 2700 RAM, so that even non-overclocked, you have a larger envelope of safety to work with.
 

jediphx

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Oct 4, 2000
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ok thanks. anyone in the meantime have any tips tweaks etc? also whcih via drivers will I have to use? Iknow on my 8k7a I just use the amd agp miniport patch. both my HDs are connected to a Promise ata-100 controller card.
 

maluckey

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Jan 31, 2003
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As far as the VIA drivers go, you should use the most current set. It is a unified architecture, and autimatically installs what it needs to support the chipset at hand. I'm using 4.49 now,

The Promise Controller is fairly stable, and some say better than the older Highpoint Controllers. Make sure you have the latest drivers for the controller though, to avoid problems. One thing that Many do, is to use software RAID in XP-Pro. I'm not familiar with whether 2000 has this feature. The reason that you might try the software RAID, is to avoid having to worry about the controller at all.
 

jediphx

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Oct 4, 2000
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on my epox 8k7a I have my 2 HDs on a promise ata-100 card. do I not need that on the dragon?
 

maluckey

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Jan 31, 2003
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No, you need it unless your OS supports software RAID. If it does, you can use traditional IDE hookup, and use the OS to control the drives. I'm not sure if Win 2000 supports software RAID, or not.
 

yodayoda

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Jan 8, 2001
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Originally posted by: jediphx
ok my other mobo is about to die so im about to install my AMD 1800+ XP into a Dragon + KT266A. I havent had a VIA chipset mobo in some time so I need some pointers, tips, performance tweaks etc. I will be running Win2k pro SP4, unless for this mobo winxp pro is better. I have 512 megs pc2100 and two ata-100 7200rpm Hds. My sound card is a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz so I wont use the onboard sound. My vid card is an ATI Radeon 9500 modded to 9700np 128 meg. I have a new 450W PS. HP 9300i CDRW and a new shiny Operite DVD+-RW drive. Fire away :)

dude, i got one question: why? it looks like you have a pretty awesome rig, except for the motherboard. the KT266a is about 4 generations ago for the via line (since then we have had the KT333, the KT400, the KT400a, and the KT600). and none of them hold a candle to the nForce2. i think your best bet is to sell the dragon and the santa cruz and pick up an nForce2 board. newegg has a Biostar board for $57 after rebate and lots of other boards in the $70s and $80s.
 

maluckey

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Jan 31, 2003
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But what he has is at no cost, so is 57 dollars cheaper, and with creative overclocking can beat stock NForce2 and KT 400a boards, not only score wise, but in real world apps. See below, what a KT 266a can do, air cooled, RAM at 2.85 volts, CPU at 1.725 volts. The scores are faster than the SANDRA reference KT400, and NForce) The CPU, and the cache scores are even more impressive!

SiSoftware Sandra

Int Buffered aEMMX/aSSE (Integer STREAM) Results Breakdown
Assignment : 2973MB/s
Scaling : 2974MB/s
Addition : 2961MB/s
Triad : 2960MB/s
Data Item Size : 8-bytes
Buffering Used : Yes
Offset Displacement Used : Yes
Bandwidth Efficiency : 93% (estimated)

Float Buffered aEMMX/aSSE (Float STREAM) Results Breakdown
Assignment : 2975MB/s
Scaling : 2800MB/s
Addition : 2682MB/s
Triad : 2624MB/s
Data Item Size : 8-bytes
Buffering Used : Yes
Offset Displacement Used : Yes
Bandwidth Efficiency : 87% (estimated)

Test Status
Memory Used by Test : 256MB
SMP Test : No
Total Test Threads : 1
SMT Test : No
Dynamic MP/MT Load Balance : No
Processor Affinity : No

System Chipset
Model : Gammagraphx Inc VT8366/A,VT8367 Apollo KT266/A,KT333 CPU to PCI Bridge
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 200MHz (400MHz data rate)
Max. Bus Bandwidth : 3200MB/s (estimated)

Logical/Chipset Memory Banks
Bank 6 Setting : 256MB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-3CL 2CMD
Bank 7 Setting : 256MB DDR-SDRAM 2.5-3-3CL 2CMD
Bank Interleave : 4-way
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 200MHz (400MHz data rate)
Max. Memory Bandwidth : 3200MB/s (estimated)

Features
MMX Technology : Yes
SSE Technology : Yes
SSE2 Technology : No
HTT - Hyper-Threading Technology : No
EMMX - Extended MMX Technology : Yes

Performance Tips
Notice 5008 : To change benchmarks, click Options.
Notice 5004 : Synthetic benchmark. May not tally with 'real-life' performance.
Notice 5006 : Only compare the results with ones obtained using the same version!
Tip 2 : Double-click tip or press Enter while a tip is selected for more information about the tip.
 

jediphx

Platinum Member
Oct 4, 2000
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Lord it took me till 2:30 this morning to get the system up and running and Win2k pro (which I was running forever on my 8K7A) would not install after 6 tries and winxp failed once before I could get it installed.

first I flashed the bios to a newer one and the system would start but the monitor would not light up LOL
had to reset the cmos and all was ok then when i tried to install win2k pro evrytime I would get to the registering components part it would bring an error like unable to register COM+ (i have never had that error and have installed win2k pro 100's times and then it would just stop and not go any further. ended up having to install winxp and even that failed during setup the first time around with some "unable to access registry" BS. Finally got winxp pro stable on it now but why in the hell could I not install Win2k pro on this mobo?



 

maluckey

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Jan 31, 2003
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Did you repartition the drive, then perform an absolute format before you installed? If you didn't delete the old partition, it will cause these errors. Also, if you did delete the old partition, and are installing your OS on a fresh one, you should be wary of your RAM. Borderline RAM, or improperly installed RAM (and sometimes CPU heatsinks), can cause this as well. When all is up and running, use Prime 95, Memtest 86, and SANDRA burn-in, to stress the system and ccheck for stability. If it can pass these for three or so hours, it normally indiccates a stable system. Of course longer is better, but after three hours, most errors that are going to happen, will already have happened.

Side note...You should also delete the partition if you changed from 2000 to XP.

Good luck!
 

jediphx

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Oct 4, 2000
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yeah i deleted the partition. I will try running sandra and seeing what it does.