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Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra Overclocks

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marphyre

Registered
Joined
Mar 4, 2002
Location
Farmington, MO
Hi, I was just wondering what everyone else's experiences were with this board? I've had mine for about a week now, and been messing with oc'ing it, but not having any good luck with it :/ Although I noticed in the CPU Database that there were quite a few successful oc's with it. Mine I can't even get to boot stably at 105fsb :/ I have noticed in other forums that people have had a lot of problems oc'ing with it also though...so am I (and the rest) just missing something? I've got the ram running at 166 with no problems, and even if I drop that down, it doesn't help the fsb any. Any suggestions/oberservations?
 
Hi and welcome to the forums. Before we can help you you need to give us more info. What are your system specs, besides the mobo of course, as we already know which one you have. :D
 
Well, this seems to be a problem with the Dragon Ultra's in general, but here's the rest:

P4 1.8a
512 megs (2x256) samsung 2700 ddr
gainward gf3 ti200 128 meg
and the usual assortment of extra nic card, cdrom, dvd, cdr, etc...
 
I have the P41 Fire Dragon not the ultra, and I am at 120 FSB completely stable. I could get higher if Soyo had agp and pci dividers to keep those in spec, but they dont. I believe thats the main reason for not getting higher fsb cause it just sends the agp pci bus way too high.
 
Currently running P4 1.8 (willy) at 2.05 Vcore @ 1.82 (maxed out with Vid pin mod but this board will not give any more). FSB at 114 mem at 114 x 5/3 x 2 = 380 Vddr @2.8v 2-2-2 adjusted from Turbo default. All the extra tweaks in memory didn't gain too much in the Sandra bench. DIP switch doesnt want to work, if I try to use it to increse the Zclock it won't boot, even at 100/100 :mad:

Just remember, if you change your fsb or clock ratio it will set your tweaked memory timings (CAS RAS etc) back to default and you need to go back in and tweak it back before doing a final save. I think I could get my memory faster but my CPU won't boot at 117, unstable at 116 when loaded. If I could just get 2.9v on the CPU it would go to 2.1 stable I'm sure.

Memory is Kingmax PC333 256M, cooler is Volcano 478 until I get my aqua finished and installed in my new Antec 1200 case. The temp monitoring not only seems to be a problem on the Soyo but on a lot of SIS-645 chipset boards, CPU runs 45-51 irrespective, even when you unplug you CPU fan and let it cook.

This board has some serious bios issues that Soyo need to address, otherwise their name is likely to get sullied and their market share is going to suffer. MSI actually have a forum on their sight where tech support can get feedback and address problems - I don't see Soyo doing that, jeez your lucky if they even email you. They need to wake up and smell the coffee. I'm ready to jump ship on their "fabulous PS4" and go elsewhere if they don't address the bios problems.


Incidentally, this board came without a MAC address from brand new and had I to get a EE flash util from them to flash the NIC. Also, this board would not talk to my Promise RAID PCI card so I had to go to onboard RAID - but my Drive Index is now only 20,000 - thats is a 12,000 point drop compared to my Promise on my old system (see specs in sig) :mad: The reply from the tech support guy at Soyo was "there must be a compatibility problem," wow, what a revelation.

Final bit of advice, run your system with only a video card, tweak fsb a little at a time, leave mem clock at 1:1, up your Vcore to 1.8 and see how far the cpu will go. That "Woody" should go to 2.4 easy w/stock HSF. When you've found it's upper limit pull it back to stock and start to tweak the memory. Go 100 fsb, 3:4 ratio and up the Vddr to 2.7, try different settings ie Normal, Fast and Turbo. First set fast setting then switch fsb ratio from 1:1 to 3:4 (thiswill load predefined settings for ram) - then save/reboot and bench. Then do same again but use Turbo (switch ratio back to 1:1 then back to 3:4 otherwise it won't load Turbo settings). If that goes okay then start increasing the fsb, you should reach a point where the memory won't allow you to boot and hopefully that is before you hit the max fsb that the cpu will run at. Now you know how fast your cpu and mem will run, next is to find a happy medium between the two upper limits.

Good luck, wish I had a 1.8a but I got this mobo and Willy as a bundle for @279, I was hoping to get the Woody but Fry's wasn't bundling it that way, actually I don't think they even had ant Northwoods in stock.

edit: If you are using 2 sticks of meme then try only one stick of mem to start as this board also seems to have issues with two 256M sticks together - the 512 is more stable.

Look here for more :-
http://www.vr-zone.com/cgi-bin/vb/forumdisplay.php?forumid=20

and here for an excellent review :-
http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/sy_p4s/

PS: sorry for the long post :burn:
 
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yea...I have some issues with my Soyo (P4S Dragon Lite) board too. For one, I got two of them. One was DOA and the one in use has a defective onboard nic. I'm still in the process of getting it RMA'ed and it's been over a month now.
For some reason, it works fine to a point at 150FSB (the ram I'm using use to run at 155FSB without heat-spreaders on my old Iwill board with an AthlonXP....before the XP fried and I ditched AthlonXPs until they resolve the thermal issue).
But I found out that for some reason, I have to drop the clock a bit so that I don't get weird errors (I had trouble installing half-life).

I plan to get an Iwill P4HT-S (I've had some good experience with them and their RMA policy is something I like just in case, unlike some mobo makers) but in the mean time, I wonder if it's the northgate that's overheating that's causing data corruption and schtuff....plus I think the thermal probe is foobarred. It jumps from -10C to 76C (but usually stable in the mid 40's), both in Motherboard Monitor (latest version) and in the BIOS.
 
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