Soyo K7V Dragon problems

I have been having some problems getting my board to work the way i would like it to. I purchased the soyo k7v dragon because of all of its features and i am unable to take advantage of them.

The sound was pretty sh*tty so i went out and bought an audigy.

When over clocking with my 1.2 266FSB, i can only go up to 1.33(10x133), when i put my front side bus up to 140, i can't boot. I have a feeling that some of this may be due to my memory timing but i'm not sure. I have Cas2 crucial PC2100 ram and in the bios it automatically sets it to 2.5 , Now i was just wondering if this has happend to anyone else.

I was installing WinXP and it asked for the driver for the RAID controller onboard, and i used the one that came on the driver disk which is the Promise Fast trak 100 lite driver for Win2k, After installing i can't tell you how many times i crashed. Most of the times after 17 mins or so. So i broke out my old PCI Fast trak used the XP drivers off of the promise site and got it working. (2x30.0 WD 7200rpm RAID 0)

Now I don't want to believe that i wasted my money on this board when it was rate so highly. If you have any solutions to the problems that i have described please post a reply.

well, if you're running at 133 host, you ARE at 266 FSB because it's a DDR board- that is, as long as your CPU is DDR. You have good ram, if you're saying you set it to cas 2 but the bios kicks it to 2.5, maybe the Dragon won't use it at cas 2 because 140 mhz host is too fast even for that stuff. I mean that does make it 280 fsb with the ddr and all. Try a smaller jump up from 133. if you have to bump your voltage to make your box boot at the higher speed, better have the good cooling in place.

Must be something in your rig that doesnt like the overclock. I can get my FSB up to 155Mhz with the same memory as you and all the settings maxed out. Have you removed the heatsink on the northbridge? Soyo "forgot" to put some thermal compound between the heatsink and the chipset. Also, for a better overclock put the DRAM timing to manual instead of SPD, i got passed the 151Mhz mark by doing this. As i said, i got to 155Mhz with all my memory settings maxed out. With my settings a little less agressive i might get to 160Mhz which would make it 320Mhz!!! As for your memory, if its Crucial PC2100 i dont think they make some at CAS 2 they all come at CAS 2.5, so the bios would be right. If that doesnt work, post back and ill see if i missed anything i did to get a good o/c

Well i have been running stable at 2.5 I don't know what to say about the memory timings. What would i have to do to set them manual.

Now the voltage settings on the Dragon are very intersting, Can you explaing them to me? I think my chips default is set to 1.65 How would i set them in the bios.

Btw, i heard through the grape vine that at PCI USB card is needed with the KT266 Chipset if one would like to raise his FSB above 150 is that true. I picked one up just in case. Granted if i were to get up to 1.4 stable i would be happy and that would only involve my cpu being set to 10x140FSB.

go to page 68 of your mobo manual

go into the bios and find where it says "dram clock /drive control" inthe "advanced chipset" area.

...set the dram clock to either 100 or 133

...set the dram timing to manual.

...set the sdram cycle length to 2 (this is "column access strobe" or "CAS")

...set the bank interleave to 4 bank

Also, do everything manually, don't activate the optimized settings...and if you screw up, I think it changes everything back to default so you don't permanently damage stuff. It's a great board, just not really for overclocking. I could get it to post at like 150, but I lost USB at 138, so it wasn't worth it(even with a USB hub). The sound is good, though, and having onboard 10/100 should be a requirement, nowadays. If you want to snap the board in half of somethingg...send it to me, and I'll send you my dead dragon, I'll put yours to use