Soyo k7V Dragon installed -- so far so good

[gibson]

Hi all,
I was in the market for a new mobo right as the dragon came to market. The other day I saw some messages wondering if anybody had installed a dragon yet. I just did and would like to share a few simple observations. If anybody has questions, I'd love to try to answer them. Bear in mind, I'm a civil/environmental engineer, not an electronic engineer

I installed my first Dragon the other day, and it was flawed due to an apparent manufacturing error in resistor placement. Apparently some of the resistors were moved by hand in a recent batch. (Of couse, I didn't know this when installing it, and spend hours messing with stuff, and worring that I FU'd something while installing it.)

The store I bought it from kindly gave me a new one the next day, which is now installed and running very nicely. I haven't yet run benchmarks to compare it with my previous super crappy soyo K7ADA.

The onboard audio so far hasn't really impressed me. I'll prolly go back to my SBLIVE value.

The network card seems to be using my cable connection just fine. Does anybody know of a way for me to test it?

I'm not currently using, nor do I have shorterm plans to use the RAID controller.

The guy at the shop where I bought it remarked that the memory timing chip gets particularly hot. When somebody asked him about it, he said yes there are small cooling devices for such a chip, but that it doesn't appear to be causing a problem. He just wanted to let me know not to stack anything up against it somehow.

I'll post some benchmarks later today hopefully.

--gibson.

Athlon 1.33G / 256 DDR 2100 ECC
Soyo-K7V Dragon
IBM Deskstar 100ATA
3D Prophet DDR-DVI

 

[Bozo Galora]

"moved the resistors by hand"
at what point in the manufacturing/sales cycle did someone move resistors (assumedly) with a soldering iron. That is nuts. Maybe your vendor was playing around with it. Surely the factory wouldn't. Why dont you call Soyo and tell them what your vendor said for their reaction.

What IRQ did your RAID bios take, and did it stick itself to something else? Is raid disableable by jumper?

 

[gibson]

good point.
The vendor said that it appears (by visual inspection) that some resistors were moved by hand. He also allegedly observed this on the other 10 boards in their inventory.

Anyway, I don't know which IRQ the raid uses because I disabled it in the bios. There are only a few jumpers on this board (cmos clearing and a few other necessities i guess), and i think zero dipswitches.

 

[LoneWolf1]

For more indepth information on the K7V, take a look at the SOYO Dragon Thread over in the motherboard forum. A must read for anyone interested in this mobo.

 

[gibson]

this is gibson again, I ran a few Sandra (2001te Standard) benchmarks on my DRAGON K7V, compared to my k7ADA (in parenthesis) board:

CPU Benchmark:
Dhrystone 3703 (3743)
Whetstone 1817 (1832)

CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
MMX 7265 (7600)
3DNOW 9086 (9091)

Memory Benchmark:
Int: 543 (504)
Float: 687 (683)

Suprisingly, my new board is slower (with current settings) than my K7-ADA. I know that there are a many settings in the BIOS that could affect the outcome of these marks.
Are there a few that are the top things to focus on? I find it wierd that my old board based on the ALI Magic outperformed my new board with the VIA KT266. Further, on my old board I couldn't get it to run on the "maximum" setting for performance in the bios, so those K7ADA results are from "normal", but the new DRAGON results are from "maximum" performance setting. Without maximum on the dragon, the results were slightly lower. Any hints?

Thanks folks,
--gibson.

 

[Insane3D]

My Dragon is going back. After a few days of using it, I came away very unimpressed. The layout is nice and the board is stable, but it's slow and doesn't overclock very well. Also, my board would not cold boot at all. If you shut the system off, I would have to clear the CMOS and set everything again. The Vcore settings are only partially functional, and the DDR voltage is locked @ 2.5v so FSB overclocking is not very successful...I could only hit ~140mhz stable. Also, anything from 140mhz+ would result in the USB not working. I am sure some bios updates will make this board better, but I am not that patient...it's back to my KK266-R.

 

[MrHelpful]

Insane, isn't it time to make the switch to the DDR platform?

 

[Budman]

Mr Helpfull Insane3d allready has a DDR System.