Dragon Mobos???

[attitudx]

Has anyone had extensive use of one. I am currently using the KT333 Dragon Plus. It has a few more actually alot more ocing capabilities then my MSI did and I am lost using a stick of 256 Kingston 2100 266 DDR and a amd tbred 2200, stock hsf though. I tried changing the fsb from 100 to manual and set to 140 and got a hard error and had to jump the cmos and try again. but if i set the ram to 266 it flies actually as you can tell i have no idea when ocing this board?? ANy help would be cool or just a shove in the right direction

[Ruantic]

I bought a Soyo Dragon Kt400 Ultra new, it was the board my NF7-S replaced, I read quite a few reviews which all boasted of its OC ability, and general great features. It was a good stable board, except it wouldn't run the R9700P properly, It was also a huge waste of time to attempt to overclock it! Best it would do 137-138 fsb, anything higher and had to clear cmos with jumper.
very frustrating. It would run 166 fsb ok, so that was the only choice for any real results. All this with with memory which easily gets over 220 fsb, and a processor that does the same. No matter what I did it was the same results with the board, simply the worse OC board i've had. I have no idea what Soyo did to make the Via boards such poor overclockers but I won't buy another.....

[attitudx]

maybe just maybe i should have asked this question before purchasing my system

[Ruantic]

Yeah, I went through the same thing, I bought a Soltek board with information based on reviews, decent board, but definately lacking, wasn't quite happy with it, so I bought the dragon, again based on more reviews, definately not what I wanted.... Found my way to some decent forums, where based on REAL results bought the NF7-S, just wish it would have happened sooner could have saved myself about $250..

If your processor will take it set the fsb to 166, the Soyo is currently running a 1700+ 100% stable 13x166, that was my best solution, hardcoded the 1700+ to appear as a 2100+ and set fsb to 166.

[Player0]

Its best to always ask for a general user experience when buying products. Reviews are almost always postive for products, and they never tell the whole story, especially when overclocking or long-term stability is an issue. Seems as though some reviewers only review products they have a personal preference for and provide 'biased' results, or they're afraid to loose suppliers.

Case in point? Tomshardware.com loves Asus boards, and they constantly review Asus boards as #1, while other sites rank Asus lower usually (although still in the Tier 1 class). Some guys are Abit fans, some guys are Iwill or ATI or MSI fans.

Anyway, reviews are hard to go by, you will almost always find good reviews for products even if there is much better out there. Go by the reviews that compare the board to at least 6 others, and check the boards, thats where most people speak the truth :)

[attitudx]

cool I know the guy that built my system, i had someone else do it and he was big on dragon, actually he rmad a soltek and was having problems so the distrobuter sent a brand new dragon kt333 plus my board to compensate. I like it stock have no problems just seems that i am lost when ocing it my 2200 is a tbred b though and I guess it dont hurt to oc it just the bios is different. I would much rather have an MSI Nforce board

[attitudx]

this is what i did simple stock hsf i didnt have cpuid installed and didnt want to run it long but it was simple

[Drake]

45C is nothing to worry about :)

[attitudx]

OK cool after frying a mad ocing 1700 i get alittle leary. My 1700 at 1.75v was running at 1.89g and 50 idle. I had done everything reapplied as3 lapped the hs, moved to a dual fan hs and still couldnt get the temp down i think maybe my big ole 250w ps wasnt pushing enough juice. I took out the 1700 and cleaned it the hsf and put it back in and poof nice smoke. So now with this i get a little leary about heat but yeah 45 idle 47 load at 2.0g