problems with soyo board

[Guest]

I just built a thunderbird 1000 comp with a soyo board K7VTA-B and have been having some disturbing problems. The biggest problem is that one of my favorite games, diablo 2, freezes after about 30 minutes of play. I am also getting a lot of "illegal operation" messages.
When I loaded the 4 in 1 drivers i would get a message after rebooting asking for the "AGP VxD disk", which I don't know what that is, but then it say's the file viagart.cat cannot be found and I eventually have to skip the file. Also, if I try to enable the dma for my cd rom, the cd rom stops working and I can't access anything from the cd rom until I un-check the dma. The board also had onboard sound which I could not seem to get working properly. The driver's were supposed to be the 97 codec that came on the disk with the board, but when I loaded them the microsoft sound that plays at windows start was all scratchy, which I know wasnt right. If I tried to let windows detect the drivers it couldnt find any. Finally I just installed my own sound card. I tried downloading the 4 in 1 drivers but I had the same problem's. Also, the game diablo 2 played fine in my previous computer with the same graphics card and cd rom, and I have tried un-installing and re-installing it.
Basically my question is this: What's the general opinion of Soyo board's out there? Am I doing something wrong or should I take the board back and if so, what are some good boards to try getting?
Thanks.

 

[Guest]

I have used many Soyo boards over the past years without
problems. I am posting this on a K7VTA-B/Duron600@950. Been running about a month now with no major quirks. Had a minor setup problem because of the onboard sound. Disable it in the bios( 3 places I think) and you should be able to use your sound card. You didn't say what OS you are using, I have WIN 98 first version. Did you install the IDE Bus Master drivers? Not needed for 98 and if installed, can cause problems because 2 drivers (VIA and MS) are trying to control the same function; use the Micrsoft supplied drivers instead. Here is a list and order of the VIA drivers needed if using 98: don't need the 4 in 1 pack, as the individual drivers are available from the VIA website.

1st Clean install of 98
2nd Install VIA IRQ Routing driver version# nirq13a
3rd VIA AGP driver version# vagp404
4th VIA INF driver version# inf102b
5th Install the video drivers that came with your video card. At that point, you should be up and running. One thing to check,in the combo features screen in the bios, check to see that the "auto detect DIMM/PCI CLK" is enabled and the "CPU HOST/PCI Clock" is set to default. Latest bios version for this board is 2aa2; head over to the soyo tawain site if you need it. I have a list of my bios settings; e-mail me if you want to compare.

Andy

 

[Guest]

Thanks much for the response, some of this information will come in very useful. I actually found something that seems to have solved most of my major problems, though I am not entirely sure why. It may be a bit difficult to explain it but I will try.
I have a kenwood 72x true -x (cd rom) hooked up and an iomega zip cd re-writer wired up as a slave. Now, when you hook up the ide cable to these two there is the one end that goes into the board and then the other two end's that each plug into the cd rom's. Well, there is a very natural looking way to do this, where if you hold the cable one end will obviously plug into the top (master) cd rom and one end will plug into the device beneath that. However, if I did it that way my case was so big that the cable would pull somewhat on my board, so i kind of turned the cables around and plugged the end that would seem to naturally go to the top (master) cd rom into the iomega and the other end into the kenwood. I am not at all an expert but I would think that it wouldnt matter which of these two ends goes to which cd rom, and my roommate, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, said that this wouldnt make any difference at all, however, when I tried re-arranging the cables, and plugging them in the way they look like they would naturally go, all my problems disappeared. I can enable dma and my game no longer freezes. I then moved both my cd-rom's down a slot so the cable doesnt pull on the board too. I suppose it's possible that maybe one of the cable's wasnt entirely tight in the original position or something, but I am pretty sure I checked all that stuff, and I know about the red pin going in near the power line and all that. Anyway my system works now and I am happy .
I am still a bit perplexed by the way the drivers installed and I intend to check on that information you gave me, thanks much for the help!
take care.

 

[Guest]

oh yeah by the way I am using windows 98 se full version

 

[Guest]

Cable direction shouldn't matter; I would guess that a pin or 2 was not down in the connector on the MB and that was causing the problems. Driver versions and order of install are the same for 98SE.

 

[Guest]

I forgot to mention that the Soyo site in Taiwan just posted the latest VIA 4 in 1 driver pak (4.27) just in case you need to reinstall.

Andy