On Sunday August 24 2003 07:16 pm, Philip Webb wrote:
> that's what i bought: a Barton 2500+ & a Soyo Dragon KT400 Ultra
> Black mobo. unfortunately, i ran into an obscure incompatibility
> between these items & my 8x AGP card when i tried to run with FSB
> = 166 MHz . a lengthy e-correspondence with Greg Meyer & Soyo
> support led me to return the mobo for attention & the latest news
> via the dealer is that these mobos have been recalled by Soyo &
> wb replaced. so i'm currently on hold, which doesn't matter a
> lot,
> as my present box has stopped making painful noises (one of
> Murphy's laws) & i'm not intending to migrate anyway till Mdk 9.2
> comes out next month.
>
> any other thoughts or comments are welcome.
I was on the fence, needin to upgrade. The 2500+ thru the 3200+
is the same core, sorted for sale. Intel does the same thing. If
you don't mind the extra bucks, the higher sorted chips have the
better ns rated L (1 & 2) cache parts. Soyo boards are excellent,
never a discouraging word from me. But the current champ for high
end XP's is Aopen, kt400a (kt600) chipset, AMD recommended (as is
Soyo, but they don't have a kt400_a_).
'Not a puff, I bought it', it's the BEST' comment. IME, with VIA
chipsets ..always wait for the 'a' version. Also IME, stay away
from SiS or nForce* chipsets for Linux (jus read the LKML, _not_
Net windoze hardware site reviews). BTW, my old board was a Soyo
k7vta pro, the board before it, a Soyo 6ba +III. I'm a Soyo fan.
OTOH, before Soyo, I used an Aopen, now a...
Aopen AK77-400 Max, XP 3000+ overclocked to 3400+? (2288mhz),
cheap Kingston 512 MB ram at CL2.5, R/C 2, preCH 2, 2-bank (way
over it's CL3-3-3, bank disabled specs), bios reports DDR419. Runs
memtest86 til the cows come home, an L-cache 13,900mb/s, ram at
708mb/s. mprime-17, cpuburn's 'burnK7' can't kill it either. Runnin
current cooker (9.2 RC1). Vcore 1.75, AGP and IO volts are also
+.10v bios adjusted and rock solid steady.
My point is tho, it all has to work together, includin the
keyboard, mouse chair. Configuration is as important as the actual
hardware. Look above, I seek the 'sweet spot' for what I've got.
The cpu will clock to 2.4 ghz, the ram won't, but it does better
than the damn nVidia card will. My limiting factor jus' now is my
Abit nVidia junk. But, it can be configured/mitigated to a minor
factor in bios. The same holds true even if you don't overclock.
AGP, much less AGP 8x is a kludge. It's a PCI 2 spec with hyped
up marketing terminology for DirectX Winblows users. Still runs on
the old tired PCI 33mhz bus. Set your aperature to 4 to effectively
disable sidebanding, bios and XFree to 1x (ie, minus kludges), an
avoid the cruel marketing gimmicks for winsux users to spare
yourself the grief.
OTOH, I already had/have a tried an true Sparkle (AMD app'vd
PSU). Don't blame Soyo, you could very well have a substandard
power supply. You do monitor voltages for accuracy an steadiness,
right? An coolin? Fancy cpu coolers are for the kiddies, jus keep
the case at room temp an a generic cpu hs/fan will do jus' fine.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
