P4S Dragon Ultra Problems

Help! I've had two problems with my new P4S Dragon Ultra board.
Here's my set up first:

Enermax 550W Powersupply
Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra MB
Intel P4 2.0A Northwood processor
2x256M Corsair PC2700 DDR RAM (CAS2)
Chieftec Dragon Full Tower
Creative Audigy EX Soundcard
Gainward Geforce4 Ti4600 750XP Golden Sample (but using old Matrox G400 currently as you will see below).

First my Geforce 4 card produced loads of screen artifacts as soon as the machine starts to boot through the POST or even in BIOS. Foolishly I blamed the card and have sent it off to Komplett for testing/replacement. I am now getting the impression from this forum that the board may be to blame. While I am waiting for it to come back I have Flashed the BIOS and updated the AGP driver and carried on using my trusty (but slow!) Matrox G400. Do people reckon I have a hope in getting a Geforce4 card to work with this board using the latest BIOS (2ba3)?

Second, I don't know if I'm being an idiot and have wired my machine up to the case wrong but I've got a weird problem. I switch on my machine's powersupply and use the power button on the front of the case and the machine beeps and starts to boot. If I do a software reboot from XP, or press the reset button, or shutdown and then restart the machine the following happens. The power light comes on and there is a brief flash of disc activity and the CD-ROM drives spin briefly but the display doesn't come on, no beep and no boot. The only way I have found around this is as follows - switch off on the powersupply, press the power button on the case, switch off and on on the powersupply and then on on the case power button.The machine then boots fine. There are no other problems such as instability etc. This is consistent every time and always does this. Please point out if I'm missing something obvious, or does anyone reckon there's a genuine fault?

Feedback on both of the above much appreciated!

Many thanks

Welcome to OC.COM "aubergine."

Are you overclocking your mobo or vidcard firstly?

I think there are issues with the Audigy and XP, although as you can see I have neither, I do however experience some boot issues when overclocking my machine at 2.4, it will boot to the post screen then I normally see it scan the drives but sometimes it does not - that is when it just stops booting. I have a feeling the problem may be solved by vidpinning the cpu to a higher default vcore but haven't tested my theory yet.

You should have removed all peripherals except the video card and one stick of memory first, then checked it to see how it performs before sending off your video card. Pull that audio card and see if you still have boot issues. Then if it's fine try your audio card in different slots.

Hi 'LimeyGreg'.

Many thanks for you feedback and the welcome to the forum. I'm not overclocking either the mobo or vidcard yet. My priority has been to get a fully functional system before I attempt to overclock.
I've seen a post on another forum about someone with the same boot problem, I think the Vcore issue may be worth checking out....

Funnily enough since my last post I've found I have a weird Audigy problem as well. The card plays mp3s, MIDI and games etc but when I play a CD (I have a Liteon DVD drive plugged into the digital input and a Plextor CR-RW/R plugged into the analogue input), only the left side plays. If I try and rip a CD track to mp3 it rips but again only the left channel plays and this time is distorted as well. I've applied two Audigy patches but still no joy.

Any thoughts on whether this is a hardware fault or an Audugy/XP problem? I'm flagging this with Creative as we speak....

Once again feedback appreciated....

Cheers....

I'd pull the DVD and Audigy. Rip the CD to HD and then burn it to the blank. Then try to play it on another computer if possible, or if the Lite-On has a 3.5mm headphone jack listen to it with headphones to see if the original plays properly, burn a test disk (not MP3) and see if the burned disk plays propery through headphones. Borrow or buy a cheap SB32 or Aureal sound card and see if that functions okay.

Does the LiteOn play through the analogue connector to the sound card ??

PS - sorry about the delay getting back to you, I've been a little busy.

i wouldn't say that the audigy is problem free as I had a defective card too, just not the same problem. Have you made sure that the sound mixer tabs are correctly showing your inputs. Maybe you can swap the cdrw and the dvd using the digital inputs to see if its the audigy's fault.

As for the GeForce4 gainward, keep me posted on that. I'll be getting mine in about a day or two and I don't look forward to troubleshooting

Latest update on problems

OK, here's the latest. My Audigy problem is solved....well at least I have an easy work around on this. It turns out that, thankfully, it is not a hardware problem but a software one. It boils down to Creative PlayCentre being at fault. I have this set as the default player on the system and when a CD is put in and starts to play, PlayCentre causes most of the channels in the surround mixer to be muted, strangely causing my odd problem of only sound from the left speaker and distortion on mp3 playback. If these are unchecked, everything plays fine. Using other players doesn't cause this problem. So all sorted, bar a minor inconvenience, which hopefully may get picked up in future software updates (well we can but hope can't we?! ).

On the Gainward Geforce 4 Ti4600 front. I have a new card from my supplier (Komplett).....BUT....when I plug it in and start to boot I get a lovely candy stripe effect of greens and pinks on the screen which doesn't go until the Windows boot when I get an 'Out of Frequency Range' warning on my monitor. I've yet to spend more time paying with this. Does anyone know of a solution to this. The number of posts I see on Soyo/VIA/SiS/Gefore 4 problems on various boards really worries me, I must say.

Still have my odd boot problem and I've spotted posts with other people having the same issue. It looks like a voltages issue, so I may play with that. I'm just hoping for some Soyo BIOS & driver updates......

Help on any of the above much appreciated!!!!!

Geforce 4

Yfan,

How are you getting on with your Gainward Geforce 4? Let me know.

I'm just wishing I'd waited for a Parhelia! :-(

Hi LimeyGregg and Aubergine

I have a Soyo Dragon I was thinking about bringing back from the dead but after reading these post and others, I think I'll just let her rest in peace. Dang, LimeyGregg it sounds like your a noob. HydroOnion stike again!!!

I had the same problem with a Ti4400 and P4S Dragon board. If you hit reset when you see the video distortion the computer should boot normally. You may have to do that 2 or 3 times. In case it matters, this did not happen with my Radeon 8500. I did have other problems with the R8500 though.

BTW... flashing the bios to the latest version (at the time) fixed that problem but created major performance issues for me. I noticed that there are new BIOS updates since I had my board. It is worth a try.

BUT... if at all possible... return the Soyo board and get a new DIFFERENT board. That's what I did.