SY-KT400 DRAGON problem w/ Barton upgrade

Soyo SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra (Platinum) - possible memory problem when upgrading to Barton 2800+:

I have a Soyo SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra (Platinum) that I have just upgraded to Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton 333 FSB), but am running into POST/boot issues. I have had the board for about a year. Initially had Athlon XP 2400+ with Kingston 512M PC2700 (DDR333) -- everything always worked well.

Before upgrading to Barton, I upgraded the BIOS (which is indicated as a prerequisite on the Soyo website). The BIOS upgrade (9/2003) went fine and worked well under the Athlon XP 2400.

Ok, did the Barton CPU upgrade and am continuing to use the Kingston. In BIOS auto mode, the BIOS simply sets the FSB to 133 with the result that the chip is recognized as Athlon 2200 (and benchmarks are well below my prior 2400). From Soyo website, this appears to be a common issue and one must manually set FSB to 166 and multiplier to 12.5, which I do. No biggy (but not exactly plug and play). Upon entering the foregoing, the memory speed is automatically set to 166 (only other option is to set to SPD).

The basic problem is that the board has a real hard time POSTing/booting now. Typically, there is one short (normal) beep followed by a second longer beep, then the board freezes. After about half a dozen times, I can get the board to boot, whereupon the system runs fine, and at 2800+. However, anytime I have to reboot, I basically run into the same problematic sequence. (Unfortunately, never rebooting is not an option for me, given the W2K applications that I am running.)

My sense is that this is a memory issue, although the Kingston PC 2700 should be able to handle this speed. I have tried the SPD setting, but then the board refuses to POST/boot at all -- no beeps at all, complete silence.

I can reconfigure the BIOS to auto and again easily run everything OK at FSB 133, but that would be a big waste of my $200 investment in this new Barton chip. The option of multiple painful rebooting is also very unattractive.

If you have any suggestions to help me out of this fix, please let me know. In particular, I am looking for specific discussion of memory issues for this combination. Are there known compatibility issues for this memory in this configuration? Would going to DDR400 be worthwhile?

Thanks.

P.S. Please skip comments about power supply, reseating CPU, fans, etc. I already know that stuff -- been there, done that.

Update - partial solution

I can come up with an acceptable solution.

In further testing during swapping out other PC2700, I uncovered that the problem is much less severe with RAM module placed in slot 2 of Soyo board. Originally, RAM was in slot 1. Also tried slot 3 on Soyo board, but it was unfortunately as bad as slot 1.

I can live with current situation with RAM in slot 2. It still has problem POSTing about every few time, but this is much improved over prior situation. So successful POST/boot about 90% of time, vs. 10-15% before

So the Soyo SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum may have trouble running Athlon Barton 2800 with Kingston 512Meg PC 2700 (mine includes Infineon chips) at normal FSB (of 166), but the situation may be improved somewhat by trying another memory slot.

Finally, Soyo support recommended downgrading BIOS from current 2aa8 (Sept. 2003) to 2aa6. Did that, but that did not help.

that is their cure-all solution for the kt400, "get bios 2aa6", they told me that when i was trying to get 200fsb with a pci divider of 6, they said to try that bios but it didn't help

I'm running a Barton 2500+ @ 2800+ (12.5*166) without a problem. I am using 2 sticks of Kingston pc2700 512mB value ram. The bios revision on my mobo is 2aa5.

Used the exact same setup for a CPU and RAM on ym SY-KT400 UPE.

I found that getting 2 sticks and using slots 2 and 3 or 1 and 3 solved just about 100% of my issues. Also, you may have to reboot and reboot when overclocking this board to get it to recognize you settings. Mine won't restart. I have to shut down, until I got 2 sticks.