Is my Dragon+ defective?

[cloudchief]

I get random reboots and blue screens, I thought it may be the fact that I had 3 sticks of Crucial ram installed so I took one out and it seemed to be stable for a while. Soyo released a new bios (K7VXA_2BA2) that was supposed to fix the issue with 3 dimm slots being filled, so I flashed bios and reinstalled the third stick and as soon as it booted into Win2000 it crashed and rebooted. Took that stick back out and after a day, got another random blue screen. It also takes forever to post, I read someplace this was a sure sign of a bad board. I got this board from Newegg and noticed the seal on the motherboard antistatic bag was broken, and suspect this is a board someone else retuturned. Any opinions appreciated.

 

[pallander]

curious,when I first installed my cpu,I noticed it was a bit tricky to press it down in the slot completely and the result was it didnt start.
Dunno if the cpu can boot incorrectly in socket,,just a thought...
Have you tested to alter something in bios.default settings ex.
also try to take out all cards except the vga....
I had troubles ,similar,bluescreen in xp.and it was my hd(a maxtro maxplus too)the pins on the back was in wrong place,they have no manual how to put them so I guessed wrong ,but when I altered them the pc is very stable.
also try filetransfer,benchmark too see if the score is what you expect.
use sisoft sandra ..it is a good program.
get a tryout here:http://www.3bsoftware.com/products/prod_sandra.htm

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

I had the same problem with my Dragon Plus. I took out one ram stick and everything was going fine. When I heard about the BIOS I immediately got it, flashed, and put in the third stick o' ram. Things seemed to be more stable, but then I started getting lockups.

On amdmb.com forums, a lot of people are saying the 2BA2 BIOS is unstable.

I'm still shaking out a new system with lots of new hardware and XP. I think my problems may all be related to trying to get an Adaptec SCSI controller 29160N to work in coexistence with the on board Promise Raid/U100 controller. I'm going to yank it and put an IDE boot drive in this weekend. After I have a few days of solid stability, I'll try again with 3 sticks and/or the 2BA2 BIOS.

 

[WhiteWizard]

Take care on flashing the BIOS, a friend of mine, flashed a Dragon BIOS on the DRAGON+

 

[DefRef]

I'm still shaking out my Dragon+ as well, but I think part of it may be the RAM timings. There are a lot of things to twiddle with in the BIOS and the manual doesn't really explain WHAT each setting does very well.

 

[Duvie]

< Soyo released a new bios (K7VXA_2BA2) that was supposed to fix the issue with 3 dimm slots being filled >

Does anybody else think this is a bunch of crap that a board that comes and is designed with 3 slots has issues when 3 slots are used??? I mean do they even test these things...via aside cause a lot of mobo makers have issues like this and I feel it is lame and shows how they are so interested in rushing out a product that they don't test things thoroughly...

Really unexusable in my eyes...

 

[glangfor]

 

[glangfor]

Just put one of these in my box. Runs as stable as I've seen a board run. I'm running 1 stick of Muskin and 2 sticks of Crucial with no issues at all. Of course this is all running at standard settings (No overclock).

 

[Baaka]

Cloudchief,

man i have the same freaking problem...with crucial ram as well....some people say it's the cooling?? so i am going to get a bigger fan and a fan for my ram....d@mn this going to be loud!!! if i can't bear it i will take it out and all...but in any case, yes i got mine dragon at Frys and going to return tomorrow and see wassup....

i got the 2ba2 bios...and it read the 3 ram fine...but reboots came soon after...i wanted to use the cpu so i put on 3dmarks and all...crashed after the first test!! EVERYTIME@!!!

if you lower the BuS To 100mhz everything will be fine....but why do this sh!t that's why we got high end cpus!! i have an XP1800 and hecka sad!! not STABLE AT ALL i had to revert to my old machine!! meaning reinstaling all my crap..


in any case they have talked about this, cause i have been reading up lemme give you the link man!

HERE!

 

[xssiveness]

Are you using the onboard Promise RAID controller? I experienced random reboots also (using WinXP Pro) and through A LOT of trial and error found this to occur if I had my hard drives attached to both RAID ports (as master). In my case putting both drives on the same RAID channel in a master/slave configuration solved the problem. I was also experiencing an annoying hiccup (where the video would freeze momentarily) in various games (only in games, and maybe only Open GL games (e.g., Wolfenstein) at approximately one second intervals. This was also alleiviated. Of course, this begs the question of whether conecting the drives in this fashion is any more efficient than using the channels in Ultra-ATA 100 (mode 5) mode and not RAID. This configuration also worked well.

Hope this helps!

Alex

 

[Slawsk]

Seems to be happening to alot of people lately...Not just the Dragon+. Maybe RAM manufacturers are reselling defective RAM cause the prices are so cheap...

 

[cloudchief]

An update from me. It turned out that most of the problems were probably caused by the video card which went bellyup completely. Installed another card and most of the symtoms went away, but I still could not get 3 sticks of memory to run stable. 3 sticks, errors and crashes with IE and explorer, 2 sticks, all errors gone. I RMA'd the board and am hoping to get one that can handle the 3 sticks of ram.
Kinda off topic, I put the old motherboard and cpu back in (Asus P3b-f and PIII 1000/100) and was going to do a fresh install of Win2000 to get it back up (like an idiot I had deleted the ghost image I had made with the Asus), the install cd locked up early on and after a reset I let it boot into windows to see if it would. To my surprise it booted and after getting Windows to recognize the different hardware it has been running like a top. Whole new respect for Win2000! Cross my fingers and hope it lasts until I get the repacement Dragon+ back.