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Soyo Dragon+ and 3 sticks of DDR

M

Maki

Senior member
Okay,

My Soyo Dragon+ has been a great board. I decided to go to 768MB of memory. 3 256MB sticks of DDR from Crucial. (All the same type.)

I'm in stability hell. IE barely runs. I've gotten BSODs (running windows Xp) citing memory issues. All kinds of fun stuff.

The best part of all this is that I went back to 512MB of memory and things are back to normal. Oh, and I'm using the new stick of DDR.

Are there any known issues with the Soyo Dragon+ and using all the memory slots?

System - Windows Xp, Xp 1600+, Crucial 2.5 ddr.
 
Okay,

I've done some playing around.

The problem appears to be that the BIOS I had on the system didn't support 3 sticks of memory. The current BIOS from their site does support that but is buggy.

Lovely board. I wonder if they'll update the BIOS.
 
We have been in contact with Soyo about memory incompatibilities.. They claim Samsung and Nanya memory do NOT work, and one should stick to Micron only. I think it's preposterous, you take what you want from it.

 
After even MORE playing around.

I ran Memtest86 (I think that is the name of it) overnight and the new stick passed with flying colors.

I've always had SOME strangeness with the Soyo but nothing real irritating. It looks like stuffing the third stick in there just makes it worse. (A lot worse.)

I've email Soyo. I'm sure they'll tell me it is my fault. But we'll see.

I'm getting tempted to buy a K7T266 Pro2-RU to replace it. Of course then I would need to buy a decent sound board. Or maybe that Abit Maxx motherboard. ($157!?!?!? Argh!)

Course looking at MSI's faq on the k7t266 board I see the following ...

Please check: 1. Dont load high performance default in the BIOS setup as it would caused instability if your configurations like memory is not capable of running high speed Load the optimal setting instead, then manually set FSB to 133 2. Set SDRAM 1T command to disable
Click to expand...

Maybe I should just try this again and stupify all my memory settings. (I think I've done that once but I suppose I can try again.)

Edit: That quote was in reference to using 3 sticks of 256mb memory. (Or a couple 512s.) Also, my Crucial memory is all labeled MT which I think means it is all Micron.
 
After running memtest again with all three slots filled I found memory errors on one of my existing sticks of memory.

Without that stick in the system I had absolutely no issues with the system at all last night.

The questions now are -

Do these errors follow that stick of memory?
Does this only occur when I've got all three slots full? (Would seem like it since I ran memtest against that stick of memory for quite a while.)

Joy.
 
Then this is what you do, return the new memory if you can and get a 512meg stick........I mean ram is so cheap go and get 2 512 meg sticks, have a gig of ram with none of the problems of using 3 sticks
 
the dragon+ has always had trouble with all the mem slots filled. the 2ba3 bios was supposed to fix it, but still haven't seen anybody totally happy.
i just buy 512 mb sticks from now on. i have 2 of them now, and other than that their great.

p.s does anybody have the 2ba2 bios that they could send me? answer me here and i'll give you my e-mail add.
thanks........ or a link would work. i just couldn't find it on soyo's site
 
It states in the manual, about more than 2 sticks of RAM,
just use 2 sticks of 512 RAM if your going over 512 on
the board.

Excellent board no troubles at my end!.

Pierre
 
Originally posted by: colindale
It states in the manual, about more than 2 sticks of RAM,
just use 2 sticks of 512 RAM if your going over 512 on
the board.

Excellent board no troubles at my end!.

Pierre
Click to expand...

Where in the manual does it state that? I've seen nothing in the manual and nothing on their web site indicating that 3 sticks of PC2100 will not work.

I'd use two 512MB sticks if I didn't already own two 256MB sticks. Half the reason I bought the 3rd stick was that I could get it for $60 shipped from crucial. Throwing out my current memory and replacing it is a bit more expensive than I care for. I'd buy a new motherboard before I did that.

The board has been relatively great for me as well. Not nearly so stable as my previous MSI but far faster.

 
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