I/O Voltage on Soyo SY-7VCA

[Civilan]

Fellow 7VCA owners,

What's your I/O voltage?

Mine is 3.26v when the spec is 3.3v. I believe that this low voltage is preventing me from running my PC133 memory at 133MHz (FSB=100, HCLK+33). I'm wondering if I just have a dud motherboard or if this is normal for this model. If it's normal I'll just live with running my memory at FSB. But if it's not normal, I'll bring the motherboard back to the dealer for an exchange and benefit from the extra performance.

I need your feedback to justify the down-time and the hassle of convincing a dealer that my motherboard is a dud. Please help.

Why I think it's a motherboard problem:
1) I tried 2 different PC133 DIMMs which run fine up to 148 MHz in my Asus A7V / Duron rig - Not the RAM.
2) I/O voltage on the A7V is 3.5v - Not 3.26v!
3) With one DIMM (the Micron - higher quality?) the motherboard can POST with FSB=100 and memory+33 but it's unstable. The other DIMM (generic) no POST at all.

About the rig:
SY-7VCA2 motherboard, Celeron 566E@893 /w 1.80v (using VID pin trick to change default vCore to 1.65), Golden Orb. So far I've had better luck with this board then with an Abit BE6-II (max 873) and an Asus CUBX (max 723).

Soyo SY-7VCA users unite!

-Civilan.

 

[O. B. Laden]

I have some of the same discrepancies on my 7VCA. I also read 3.26 through BIOS and MBM504. After upgrading to an Antec 300watt P.S I read 3.29 to 3.31 but my +12 stillreads at 11.35 to 11.41 all the time - is the soyo flaky or what? I have been unable to get my cBo celemine 633 past 791 (83fsb, 41pci, +3%vcore, +33hclk, 128mbRAM @ turbo CAS 2, golden orb). Any higher on the voltage and I lock up in windows no matter what I do with the other settings. Do you have any information (or know where to get...) on what temp sensor 2 and 3 are? Temperature compensation variable? Best of luck!

 

[wild_andy_c]

My Soyo SYVCA and my SYVCA 2 (with ATA 100) both knock out 3.49v automatically.

I have a 300W PSU. I wire all of my chips to give big voltage headway (SY7VCA 10% is my only problem) and obtaqin 3.49v on both boards. How do I get 2 boards at 3.5v and everyone else is low. Strange. My PC 100 does 140Mhz CAS 2!!!!!!


That is testament.

 

[DRR93454]

I have the same board and mine is showing 3.39. I am running PC133 ram at fsb +33 and it is fine.

 

[Civilan]

Well it looks like we all have very different results.

I ended up going back to the dealer and replaced the board twice more. In all, I tried 3 motherboards and all 3 were unstable and all had low I/O voltage. It turns out the first board was the best. The other two weren't even stable at 66 MHz FSB and Mem and exhibited even lower I/O Voltage than the first (3.22v and 3.20v).

I tried virtually everything to get these boards to work. An Enermax 350W PSU upped the I/O voltage to 3.3 but it did not affect the stability of the boards. I tried 3 different video cards and a GeForce2 MX card made things somewhat better but I was still not satisfied. I tried my best memory, Micron PC133 CL=2 and that improved things a little bit too but not enough to make the system stable at 66 MHz.

I finally gave up and settled for a SOYO SY-7ISA+. This board is not overclocker friendly but I managed to finally get my Celeron 566 running at its top speed of 893 MHz. Because to the 815 chipset or board I can't make full use of my PC133 memory my mem scores are embracingly low. That's my next challenge.

I did notice something very interesting, the boards had a lot of silk screening spots for missing capacitors. My conspiracy theory is in the effort to reduce production costs, Soyo removed some capacitors which ended up making the boards very unstable.

It would be interesting to see if the older boards had all these capacitors.

Thanks for all your replies.
Civilan.