some soyo d+ questions

[Guest]

I'm going through the preliminaries to construct a soyo d+ based system and have some questions regarding the board.

I am very curious about the viability of the boards integrated sound and network capabilities. What is the quality & compatibility? I'd be planning on running the audio optical out to my home theatre receiver. In the future i would definitely see buying a sound blaster platinum card seeing that i might find it a necessity for music creation/editing, but I'm curious if it is an immediate necessity or not along with the purchase of a proven 3COM card instead of relying on the board's integrated network capabilities. If you were to use a periphial instead of the integrated functions, would the process of disabling the onboard functions and switching to the periphials be difficult?

Last I was curious how particular I should be about where I buy the card. An acquaintance of mine built a system from the lowest quotes on www.pricewatch.com often without checking into the vendors and his system came out fine. Given my want of bargain, this method looked enticing (though i'd probably look into each vendor more). The issue brings up the topic of OEM vs. retail -- to be honest I do not have a full understanding of the two. I was given the impression that OEM gear was relatively bare while retail was not. The last thing I'd want would be to order the Soyo K7V Dragon+ finding that it didn't include the needed seperate audio piece with connectors and the E-box with the usb ports and smart card reader.

the layman

 

[pat]

I have the dragon+. I use it with onboard sound, and to date, I have no complain at all about the quality. In game, it is doing the job very well as well as listening mp3. you should be satisfy with it for a while. As for the network, for what I've tried, it works very well. I connect my computer sometime on my cousin's LAN (he too has a Dragon+ system using all onboard) to acces the net at high speed and the system perform very well.

As for your other concern, I dont think that you will have problem, because MB come boxed with all the parts and often sealed.

the difference between OEM and retail is, suppose you want to build 1000 system. So, in order to have the best price, you dont want to pay for extra that wont be useful. So you get a OEM athlon, for exemple, because there is a company that will sell you cpu fan at very good price so the price of the OEM cpu added to the price of the fan is less by 5$ then the boxed CPU price. so, multiply that by 1000, and it is now a big difference. And often, the drivers for OEM hardware are not included, because, the manufacturer included them on a special CD that was done only for the model of computer he is building. Understand the principle.

->And this is...................ACTION!

 

[villalta]

I'm having a Dragon+ nightmare with my MOBO (x/ Athlon 1800xp). First the two PCI video cards I purchased don't work with the card. Apparently its a known issue with VIA chipset. Works fine with AGP card. I wanted to have multi-displays. Apparently the Xtasy PCI32 MX400 Nvidia chips are having IRQ sharing problem.

As for the sound. No luck in that department either. The sound just won't work. XP doesn't give me any yellow question marks, no sound device to play thru, bios is set to enable and still no sound. Weird. I'm this close to returning the MOBO.

 

[pat]

I don't think your board is bad. this board is built around the new standard for sharing IRQ like all modern hardware. The PCI card might just not be compliant to the new standard or maybe there is a trick to use 2 display card with this board in BIOS.Maybe you have to change the 'init display first' option in the bios. Check your manual.

And for your sound. have you installed the drivers that are on the soyo site? Go there and downloade the latest drivers from this site. they should works, they are working here.Follow this link.
http://www.soyousa.com/drivers.html and use the win2000 drivers

Because I think that XP doesnt recongnize the onboard sound correctly and think it is a standard device and mount it as that, so it wont work

->And this is...................ACTION!
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Pat on 01/25/02 10:02 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[villalta]

Your probably right about the mobo. The manual for the vidcards mention something about not being able to share IRQ's. I some how managed to them all to work but the sound just won't go. I then unseeded all the vidcard except the AGP to see if I could get the sound to work. I tried to load the xp drivers from soyo but when the copy process finish it alway would report the machine. So I can't even get the sound to work with one agp card, bios set to auto on IRQ's, and so forth.. I'll try to see of the 2000 drivers work...

 

[Iseekknowledge]

I have tha same mobo and I had the same problem. This what I did to correct it.
1. formated and re-instaled the os(xp) but I disabled sound in bios.I also made sure I had nothing but the video card instaled.
2. After all that I instaled latest video driver then the latest 4in4 driver.
3. modem if you have one and any other cards one at the time.
4. now anable sound in bios and install latest driver and you should be fine.

also go microsoft and up date your os.

 

[villalta]

Man!!! It must have taken days to figure out that combination of things to do. I'll give it a try and report back..

 

[villalta]

BTW, is the onboard sound even worth the trouble. I was thinking about returning the mobo and getting a mobo and a new SB Audigy...

 

[Iseekknowledge]

well you allready have the mobo, the sound is great and you could allways turn it of and get a card.
I have my mobo oc at 137x11.5 with xp1600+(unlocked) runnig 1900+ and is rock solid. I also use the onboard lan and it works perfect it has never given me any trouble.

But it is up to you!!!! I love mine but if you do decide to change mobo the procedure I mentioned is a good practice when loading a brand new system to ensure no confincts latter. A little pain now=many hours of enjoyment later. Let me know what you decide

 

[villalta]

Okay, did everything to your exact instructions. No luck!! Everytime I load the sound cards the whole system crashed and reboots when the c-media drivers finish loading. I even tried the 2k drivers without any success. I now going back to Fry's to return the mobo... Thanks for all the help. I hate to give up on stuff like this but I'm near the end of my 30 day return period..

Thanks again...

 

[non_fiction]

One thing that guy didn't mention about OEM is the warranty. You can't usually get more than a 30 day warranty on OEM. And if you're considering buying an OEM processor, AMDs usually come with a pretty cheap fan however intel will give you a pretty decent one.

 

[pat]

OEM AMD cpu doesnt come with a fan or heat sink, only retail cpu do. I have a retail one, running the heat sink and fan from AMD and my system run at 38-42 degrees centigrade, which is very good. so, unless you plan to do serious overclocking, the standard HS/F will probably do the job.

->And this is...................ACTION!

 

[villalta]

Guess what happened!!! So I was just about to give up. I went back to Fry's-E with my Drgaon+ mobo to return it to try another manufacturers mobo to see if I could get better results. To make a long story short. Fry's wouldn't let me return the mobo by its self becuase I purchased a mobo/chip combo. I didn't bring the chip so the full return wasn't possible. That was news to me. Any how, I took a chance, and since it too me 30 minutes to get down there, I dediced to do an even exchange for the mobo. Hoping that maybe there was a defect with the mobo. I usually don't give-up that easily<grin>.

I returned home plugged in the new mobo and every, every thing worked just great! Here's what running on the board.

-1800+ XP CPU
-Windows XP
-1GB of Memory DDR
-60 Gig HD
-two PCI Nvidia MX\200 and one old AGP card. I plan on
purchasing the Nvidia Ti500 G3 card
-The sound and network run just perfectly no driver
install problems

I also noticed some minor difference in one of the cable connectors. The connector for the sound card wasn't the same. the 2nd version of the mobo had the C-media 6-ch connector that could only go in one way. The old one didn't have this design.

I also noticed the bios wasn't the same. The old mobo had problems picking up the HD, and wasn't set to pick up the Athlon XP 1800 chip. The old mobo was picking up the chip as a 1.2 Mhz chip. Other than that the only other major difference I noticed was the labeling on the box. I wonder if I should post a photo of the card???

I really think (its just a theory) most of you have an older version, probably defective mobo, that may have some design problems. The new mobo is now running at peak performance!!

 

[Guest]

i was wondering..what kind of cooling system are u running and what the temps are?..thanx

 

[Guest]

Does anyone know how to get the Smart Card Reader to work on the Soyo Dragon Plus? I have the SCR hooked up to the mobotherboard. I dont know how to get it to work. I tried the manual, it doesn't say much. The card (credit card like)itself, on the back has 2 windows and both windows are white. Do I slide the card in with windows face down or up? How does this SCR works?