Post your questions and comments on the Soyo K7V Dragon Plus review.

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

Nice little review. Other reviewers were provided with a 3.5" bay smart card + 2xUSB fixture. Bit disappointing to see that not all boards are coming with that as standard.
Do you think the 10 degree temperature discrepancy could be partly or even all due to the algorithm used by Soyo to turn a thermocouple voltage into a temperature indication.

spuht

SlartiBartFast: The Soyo Bragon Plus is "supposed" to come with the white goodie box w/ the smart card reader, USB header, etc. but what I've found is that Soyo has a horrible quality control in the department of packaging.

Where I work; our "trail order" of a Soyo Dragon to "market test" to see if we'd want to carry it was missing the I/O plate. The board was dead, but knowing this happens from time to time, we asked for another board. We got a new board, that worked, and it came with the I/O plate, but was missing the CDs.

We decided to carry the product, but since we started carrying it, nearly each board had SOMETHING missing from the box. Just yesterday, I had a Dragon Plus that was missing the white goodie box you're speaking of. The whole thing was gone. I had to take a dead board from RMA and bogart the parts out of it to make this new board complete.

My biggest complaint about Soyo.

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

But the Soyo does have a full gamut of POST codes including a code for "your CPU is fuxored!". Sure, MSI has DLED... but four red LEDs can mean dead board >>OR<< dead CPU.



It's a damn shame you didn't get to try it with an Athlon XP. It's hard to get one to run 3D Maark 2001 for more than 5 or 6 hours without a lock up. Breaks my heart.

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

The temp difference could merely be a difference in the thermocouple/thermisters, or the way the board/software reads it. Best test would be an outside temp probe that was properly calibrated.

Thanks for the comments, I was kind of disappointed that I didnt get either the smart card reader or the USB headers but that wasn't really important in terms of reviewing the board. The temperatures could be due to the algorithms and I think I might try to do an outside test of the temperature. It could simply be that the temperature diode on the motherboard is faulty.

nice article.

i just ordered one last night w/XP1700+

lockups with Athlon XP's and no goodie boxes?

wow imma off to a great start

at least Multiwave is good about RMA's,

MWave:

Soyo Dragon+ w/ 30 day warranty: $145
Athlon XP 1700+ w/ 7 day warranty: $165
Ground Shipping: $10
Total: $320

Ouch!!!

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

I just realized there was a new BIOS update, ill need to upgrade to that.

I disagree with the statement that win xp gives lower memory scores. They are pretty much equivalent. Something is wrong on the mem benchmark. My ep8k7a gives me 640/820 at stock fsb under xp.

Saying it could be XP was just a thought I put out. It's reasonable that it wasn't it and I might've just gotten a bunk board. But I'm trying to get it thoroughly tested with the cooperation of other by tinkering with the BIOS settings.

I've found that this BIOS revision solves 9 out of 10 stability issues with the Athlon XP.

My "guess" is that Soyo "rushed" out the current (on the board) BIOS revision just to "show" that the CPU is an Athlon XP with the correct PR rating. This BIOS is short lived (only two months between that BIOS and the current one). Most companies don't throw BIOSes out there that fast. I'm guessing there was an issue.

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Hey. What kind of party is this? There's no booze and only one hooker. -- Bender (Futurama)

Whether you disagree or not it is a fact. Take it or leave it.

You could be right, I could not seem to get my memory score any higher, even with peoples' suggestions about tweaking the settings.

Nice looking board and goodies. Does not work well with my AMD XP 1800+. Have to continually reboot manually.

Tried my AMD 1.4 and board runs OK. I would think a BIOS update is needed for the AMDXP.