SOYO SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0

[hyper10]

Hi,
I recently purchased the SOYO SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0. I got some Patriot Dual channel 1GB PC3200 2-3-2-5 memory for it, only to find that the SOYO BIOS does not seem to allow customization of DIMM timings. The Patroit memory SPD supports CL=2.5@400 and CL=2@333, so you need to manually enable CL=2@400 in BIOS if you want to run at that speed. There is an option to disable SPD in the BIOS, and this then gives you the choice for CAS latency. However, when I select CL=2, the speed drops to DDR333, almost like it is still using the SPD. When I select CL=2.5, works fine at 400. When I select CL=3(just as a test), it doesn't even boot.

I sent an email to SOYO support, but I was just wondering if anyone has already been down this road, and if you have received any comment from SOYO. I am hoping that they will provide a new BIOS that will give you the option to force all DIMM timings.

Thanks in advance.

 

[dragon32078]

I am sorry, but I can not help you out with your problem, but I was hoping you could answer mine. I also own the SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 vol 1.0. I, however, have not made it even as far as you. My problem is the instruction manual of the mb (motherboard) insists that it can not handle a processor with a voltage higher than 1.6, and mine is slightly above 1.7v. Clearly your mb is not having isues with your processor, so if you could tell me what processor you are using that would be extremely useful. Or if you could tell me a way of getting around this mb's voltage limitation that would be even better.

Thank you,

Kevin

 

[imported_gimper48]

I am using a northwood 2.8 ghz 800 mhz front side. It boots fine. I loaded win xp on it no probs. IT will not pass more than 2 minutes of prime95. Major stability problem. I am wondering if it is my power supply but that is a pain to swap. Any ideas? Oh yeah Dragon go to soyousa.com and lookup the specified cpus that are allowed in that system.

 

[Perini]

Hi Hyper10,
I bought the same board over the labor day weekend at NewEgg. Couldn't resist the rebate.
Well all the boards do exactly the same thing as yours do. The board is a peice of shite.
I have twin sticks corsair xms platnum 512k 2t and when I set the memory to 2t it throttles back to 333 as well. This board is a 333 ddr board disquised as a 400. I can run the board at 2.5 400 ddr, but I get artifacts in my 2d maps in 3d games and also in 400 ddr this board will only run at 2.5. When and if i get my rebate back I will by a asus I865pe mother board here is the link to it. Asus P4P800 SE
This board will get the job done.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who got dooped.
Perini

 

[WadeD]

Hi,

I've bought the same board with the same memory. Pls let me know if you get a fix for it. I was going to ask Soyo support the same question.

BRGD's

Wade

 

[CorumP]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. This board has some issues it seems, mine deals with the IRQ for the AGP card, it looks to me like it's related to the new BIOS to enable my Prescott 2.8E with SP2. I don't think they quite got it right this time around, I'm getting the ASUS P4P800 SE from a seller on Ebay and hope this works out. It too has several recent BIOS updates...hoping it will work better and the "Hyper-Path" (read-PAT for PE chips) looks to be a good bonus.

Mine also randomly reboots even when not overclocked, going to demote it to a Northwood Celeron and hope it holds up with that since the Northwoods require less wattage.

 

[WadeD]

I called Soyo and bit** them out for false advertisement. They say they support the 3.2E (Prescott) but they don?t have a bios ready and it could be weeks ( that really = months). I called Tigerdirect and explained the problem to them. Tigerdirect gave me no problems and change out the motherboard with a smile on their face. I should get a Abit AI7. I?ll let you know how it works out.

 

[imported_marcus]

I purchase this same SOYO SY-P4I865PE Plus Dragon 2 V1.0 board from Newegg.com. I was taken in by the $70 rebate. But, I haven't been able to get Windows installed. The system keeps hanging/crashing during the Windows install--consistently at the "Welcome to Windows Installation" screen. I've run Memtest86+ and get errors in test 3 and 4 (out of 12 tests).

I'm not trying to do anything special like overclocking or changing the memory timing. I'm running with the optimized BIOS (AMI bios--which I've upgraded to version 2aa2) settings recommended by SOYO's installation guide.

My installation includes a P4 3.2E (Prescott) CPU, Kingston PC3200 3-3-3 1GB dual-channel kit (2X512, which SOYO recommends & I've had Kinston send a replacemnt kit which made no difference), Hitachi SATA Deskstar 7K250 80GB, PNY Verto GeForce4 MX440-8X AGP

I've upgraded the power supply from 350W to 400W thinking it might be a power issue, switched to a EIDE hard drive, used a simple 8MB PCI video card, pulled the CPU to check for bent pins (there are none). None of these made any difference.

SOYO technical support insists the CPU fan (currently running at 2500 RPM w/ CPU temp fairly consistently at 54C) is spinning too slowly--they say it should be 3500 to 5000 RPM. The thermal rating for the P4 3.2E is 73.2C, well above my CPU running temp. so I don't see that as the problem.

I'm ready to look into replacement boards from other manufactures.

 

[WadeD]

Are you using XP sp2? If so you will need to down load the latest bios.

The fan speed is a bit slow but should get faster as the heat goes up. My CPU runs at 45C and 47C under full load for 6 hours. My fan starts at about 2600 but will get to 3200 without any load and 4400 under full load. Every board might be a bit differnt and I dont trust Soyo stuff any more so it still could be a board problem. Did the fan come with the CPU? Did you use Thermal on the heat sync?

Even if you get all to work your 3.2E will show up as 2.8 because they don't have a bios ready for the Prescott. You might try to call NEWEGG and explain that Soyo has miss lead you into buying this board for the Prescott and there not ready to support it yet.

For me it just wasn't worth the rebate. I spent 1/10 on the board and it is now holding me back from running factor spec much less OCing. If you want a crappy board to underclock everything than this is it!!! My cpu and memory is under clock and I can't load all the drivers for VGA fx5700 ultra.

New board should be in Monday and I'm sending this paper weight back.

Good Luck

 

[CorumP]

How are you measuring the temps on the CPU? I have not seen any software that works well with this board as far as monitoring hardware. The bios seeems to work OK, but once I get the OS loaded and running, everything gets all screwed up. At idle, my stock fan runs about 3300 RPM on my 2.8E and I'm using a 3rd party utility to check things out when it's fully loaded and the fan is usually running near 4-5k RPM when I look at that. (The Soyo utility is way off and not working right.)

Almost nothing works as it should on this board...I'm pretty sure they will get it worked out someday, in the meantime I'm getting an Asus P4P800 SE from a guy on Ebay and he's selling 875p boards for $119 plus $12 S&H. He goes by the name of mobo_outlet and while I think I'll have to flash the new BIOS when I get my board, the board itself should be worth the money. I should get mine Monday or Tuesday as he shipped it the day after I paid for it. He only accepts Paypal as of now and only ships to confirmed addresses.

 

[WadeD]

I think with this Soyo board all apps are off for temp. It really depends on where they put the heat sensor at not only the app. I've had so many problems I will never buy a Soyo again. It's not only the bad design of the board and late bios updates but also the bad support that I get from them. By the time they get this thing updated it'll be last years techn. Maybe that's why Soyo gave such a good rebate on this one. They knew they had to get rid of them fast. I really don't want to contiue bashing them but it's too easy. I'll leave it at that.

Wade

 

[WadeD]

ATTN ALL:

Soyo didn't put there tech support # on their web page but I'm more then willing to give it to all. Soyo tech support # 909 292 2555

Good Luck
Wade

 

[imported_marcus]

Originally posted by: WadeD
Are you using XP sp2? If so you will need to down load the latest bios.

The fan speed is a bit slow but should get faster as the heat goes up. My CPU runs at 45C and 47C under full load for 6 hours. My fan starts at about 2600 but will get to 3200 without any load and 4400 under full load. Every board might be a bit differnt and I dont trust Soyo stuff any more so it still could be a board problem. Did the fan come with the CPU? Did you use Thermal on the heat sync?

Even if you get all to work your 3.2E will show up as 2.8 ...

Originally posted by: CorumP
...I'm using a 3rd party utility to check things out when it's fully loaded ...

I'm using XP SP1, but I tested all scenarios with the bios that came with the board (AMI 2aa1) and I upgraded to the two newer versions (AMI 2aa2 & 2aa3) and tested as well. Didn't make a difference.

The fan speed does rise up from approx 2500 to 2650RPMs but the system never runs long enough to get any hotter. I never run it longer than ten minutes before it hangs. I leave the side panel off as well since I've been changing DIMM configurations for troubleshooting.

I'm using the Intel fan that came boxed with the cpu. It had a thermal patch and I didn't add thermal paste. You'd think that would just keep it cooler if I did add paste, but heating doesn't seem to be a problem. SOYO didn't seem to care about the temp (consistently 54C) and chose to focus on the fan speed. Seems short sited to me. Actually, the tech support's emails looked more like he was following scripts than providing objective troubleshooting advice. He wouldn't answer direct questions and asked me to repeat tests I had already indicated in email that I had completed.

I've been monitoring the fan speed through the bios. I suppose that could be inaccurate, wouldn't surprise me. What is the third party utility that you're using CorumP?

I'm looking at the ASUS P4P800 SE. It's a bit more expensive but the bios has far more settings available (which is an AMI as well, go figure) and the manual is far more robust and actually has descriptions of all settings in the bios. That makes me a lot more confident than I am about the SOYO board.

Marcus

 

[CorumP]

Originally posted by: marcus



The fan speed does rise up from approx 2500 to 2650RPMs but the system never runs long enough to get any hotter. I never run it longer than ten minutes before it hangs. I leave the side panel off as well since I've been changing DIMM configurations for troubleshooting.

I'm using the Intel fan that came boxed with the cpu. It had a thermal patch and I didn't add thermal paste. You'd think that would just keep it cooler if I did add paste, but heating doesn't seem to be a problem. SOYO didn't seem to care about the temp (consistently 54C) and chose to focus on the fan speed. Seems short sited to me. Actually, the tech support's emails looked more like he was following scripts than providing objective troubleshooting advice. He wouldn't answer direct questions and asked me to repeat tests I had already indicated in email that I had completed.

I've been monitoring the fan speed through the bios. I suppose that could be inaccurate, wouldn't surprise me. What is the third party utility that you're using CorumP?

I'm looking at the ASUS P4P800 SE. It's a bit more expensive but the bios has far more settings available (which is an AMI as well, go figure) and the manual is far more robust and actually has descriptions of all settings in the bios. That makes me a lot more confident than I am about the SOYO board.

Marcus

When I first put it together, I put the power to the fan in the wrong socket. Maybe you made the same mistake as I did. It does sound to me like the fan needs to speed up to help keep it cool, the P4 stock fans run fast and loud, I can hear mine outside my apartment when I stand by my front door.

Try the Hmonitor as it's the only one I have seen that works halfway well with this thing, I tried a few others and they didn't even read anything sometimes.

I'll be retiring this board when the Asus gets here and let you know how it goes with that one.

 

[imported_marcus]

I had considered moving the CPU fan to the second CPU fan connector during troubleshooting to see if that would make a difference, which it didn't. And I couldn't see the RPM speed in the BIOS anymore, since only the CPUFAN1 connector is monitored in the BIOS.

I decided to cut my loss of time and return the board and get the ASUS P4P800SE board in replacement. It should be here in the next couple of days.

 

[kamranziadar]

Soyo Motherboards Sucks, i have the same Motherboard and i cannot read CPU Speed correctly 3.2 Prescott it is reading it as a 2.8GHZ.

 

[micl9]

My P4 2.4C works fine, running at 2.4 - 800 FSB - HT enabled - 4x 128MB DDR 3200...
BUT
Documentation $ux. Board runs HOT. And so far performance seems sub-par, but I have not yet run any bench marks to verify.
HT is enabled , but when I try to run 2 instances of prime95 total CPU utilization drops to 1 or 2%. One instance runs at 50% (50% total or 100% with affinity to one CPU turned on) just fine.
Bottom line this is NOT a great MoBo even for FREE. For free is it a good basic MoBo, for $75 it's a JOKE. If rebates do not come thru this will go down as one of the biggest ripoffs in history!
:|

 

[jhook]

I too puchased this particular board on Ebay for my son. We have it on on a Celeron 1.8, 256 megs of pc ddr 2100 and is running fine so far. However I will put some more stress on the machine and see what happens.

 

[bupkus]

I picked up a Celeron 325/ ECS PT800CE-A combo from Fry's about a month ago just to use the Celeron on my Soyo ( same model as all you have). I'm just wondering which motherboard I should keep and which to sell.

Notes on installation:
BIOS had trouble identifying hdd (160GB WD). Often a reboot would show NO hdd in the BIOS. I had to update the bios from the preinstalled 3/30/04 to the latest 9/10/04. Now it boots WITH a hdd listed in the BIOS every time. However, when I try to OC my Celeron 325 to a 166 fsb it won't keep. The soyo returns it back to 133. I did try 150 fsb and that seemed to keep albiet the temp went up to 50C. But, oddly, when I reboot the bios posted still lists 2.53GHz. This is with the 150MHz setting staying put.

About the temp, I currently only have the bios to read from. Immediately after first boot, I went into the bios to check the cpu temp as I always do on the very first boot. Right away it read at 47C and slowly eased up to 49C. Now that was just too fast of a jump from room temp which was about 73F to 47C so I'm willing to guess that the reading is faulty.

About the cpu, the thermal pad on the C 325 had a big air bubble beneath it. I took a razor and made a small slit and then used the edge of the blade to push the air out. It made small irregularities in the surface, but for only about 1/8th of the surface if that. I was considering installing a Zalman CNPS7000-Cu I have sitting on a shelf but then again, not to bother with this mobo.

I would never recommend this mobo. Even if I do get the rebate I still had to buy a cpu to test/use it. Now I have an extra ECS PT800CE-A I got with the Celeron as a Fry's combo. Not my smartest move.

 

[micl9]

I got my P4 2.4C at Frys with an ECS MoBo as well.
Mine came with an ECS 648FX-A (SIS chip set). It had better documentation and was easier to install. the only draw back was it has only the 3 mem slots and no SATA. I had 4x128MB DDR 3200 sticks lying around. So the SOYO gives me 512MB.
Maybe I should put the ECS back in...

 

[Tob]

Wade. I appreciate your posts after having read them here tonight. I too have this mobo...though I'm not sure if its V1.0 or not. I bought mine too from tiger and found that it didn't fire up tonight. My guess is that the powersupply is done. I was getting a little twitch from one of my chasis fans and that was it. The computer was working just fine yesterday if you consider hard locks during premiere pro 1.5 to be fine. At least it was starting up. I'm almost certain my board isn't shorted against the case as soyo support docs indicate as an option. I was curious - what was your verbage when you called tiger to get the board replace and did you in fact get a new board yet? Did you have to send in the old? I got mine in the case already installed so I wonder if they will need the entire case with the board back to make any moves toward a different setup for me. I still have yet to see my rebate from soyo as others have mentioned.

Thanks wadeD

 

[egil222]

I am a member of the club as I too got lured into buying this mobo due to the $70 rebate at Newegg. I have tried both Kingston and Komusa dual channel PC-3200 ram with a 3 Ghz Prescott and I can't get windows to install due to memory errors. I have updated the bios to the latest version fiddled with the few memory timing options available and tried running the memory in single channel mode - I can't get windows to install no matter what I try.

I emailed Soyo tech support a week ago but they just ignored me.

It seems like this mobo just can't handle a P4 with the Prescott core. I have given up on this board and ordered an Asus P4P800SE mobo as I have already wasted too much time and money trying to get this POS Soyo board to work. Hopefully Komusa will refund the money for the memory I bought from them - they already have the memory back on an RMA before I found out that the problem was with the Soyo board and not their memory.

Given how many folks are having trouble with Prescott processors and this board it seems difficult to believe that Soyo didn't know about this problem when they issued their $70 rebate offer. I guess this is a sure sign of what type of company they are I won't be buying any Soyo products in the future. Oh well maybe I can get a little money for my time and frustration by selling this board on Ebay though I will include my story in the auction so that who ever buys it doesn't try to use it with a prescott type P4. I'll start the auction at $5 plus shipping as I had to pay $5 shipping when I bought it for $70 with a $70 rebate.

 

[imported_marcus]

The ASUS P4P800SE is the solution! This board works flawlessly with the Prescott core cpu (mine is P4 3.2E w/ 1MB L2 cache). From my experience and others using Prescott core CPUs (WadeD, egil222) confirms the SOYO SY-P4I865PE Plus v1.0 (max 4GB RAM) board consitently has a problem with this generation of cpus. It may be the combination of PC3200 memory as well. I didn't try slower memory but did try a replacement kit of the PC3200 Kingston sticks--w/ no luck. However, not all is lost: lesser cpus seem to work just fine with PC2700 memory on this board, if you don't require the fastest configuration possible.

If you're a Prescott owner and decide to return the SOYO board in lieu of the ASUS board you won't be disappointed. The documentation is far better, the bios configuration is far more comprehensive, and the ASUS board has nicer features.....you pay about $20 more (and I didn't get a discout) but the it's worth it.

Marcus

 

[micl9]

Originally posted by: egil222


I emailed Soyo tech support a week ago but they just ignored me.

Try replying to their auto reply. I did that and they gave me come BS about email server issues , BUT they did answer my questions.
I used email - soyo2@pldtdsl.net

good luck!