Soyo Motherboards Suk!

[Rmcky]

If you own one and are happy with it, I'm proud for you, but these are absolutely the biggest POS out there. A friend of mine and I just bought a couple of TISUs and these are without a doubt the crappiest boards I've ever dealt with. I've owned two other SOYO boards and they were absolute junk too. I should have learned my lesson, but for some reason the price on this latest inticed me back into buying it. The biggest pisser is that the review sites can't, or for monetary reasons won't be honest about them. This board got glowing reviews. If they had taken even a few minutes to completely and honestly review the board, it wouldn't have cut the mustard. Instead, it gets a 9 out of 10 or better rating. What's up with that? Hey, all I have to say is that, if you fall prey to this company, you have been warned and you are weak. I was, but I won't be in the future! I plan to do everything I can to see that absolutely no one ever even considers buying a Soyo motherboard again.

Rick

 

[baneonrt]

Your complaint holds no water without details. What about it sucks? I'm very happy with my new Dragon Ultra board.

Steve

 

[lazy232]

No problems with my Dragon+. I'm using onboard nic, sound and usb works. A big boost in fps performance from my MSI K7T266 pro. There must be some bad ones floating arround.

 

[colindale]

Hmm Rmcky


A considerable number of QUALIFIED people have reviewed these recent SOYO Motherboards and
come to a different conclusion, I wonder why!.

I purchased a Fire Dragon Ultra recently, and found it to be rock solid, great for overclocking
with the recent Bios Update, the built in 6 Channel CMedia 8738 sound Chip is superb with
optical in and out. built in Ethernet and USB 2 outlets.

Why you have rubbished this great product, leads me to believe some you have some other motive.

Pierre

 

[Rmcky]

As I said, if you're happy with yours, I'm happy for you! I certainly don't intend to knock your boards if they are performing well for you, but I can guarantee you that there are many SOYOs that aren't. Perhaps yours are what Soyo would consider to be high end boards, don't really know or care, but I do know that they have never been too concerned about their I-815 chipset boards. I've owned them all and without doubt, they all suked, big time. If I had it in my power to be able to close this sorry excuse of a company down right now, they would be history, but I suppose that's not in the cards and folks like you will be more than happy to take up my slack. Just remember, you've been forwarned and when it comes up and bites you, use a mirror to do your complaining.

BTW, to explain what problems these TISUs have would take a volume. If you don't want to heed my warning, buy one and you can learn first hand. Then you can help me write it, hehe.

Rick

 

[colindale]

If you cannot bother to explain what problems you have had, your POST
lacks credibility.

I own a P4S Fire Dragon Ultra SIS Chipset, everything works to
perfection, including the PCI slots.

Pierre

 

[Bengt4]

I have read a lot of reviews of the DRAGON PLUS (KT266A) from "qualified people".

None of them writed that the PCI slots 1, 2 and 3 of this board are NOT CAPABLE OF BUS MASTERING, because of a bug of the board. That alone leve these slots unusuable for most hardware, including decent sound boards, modems, IDE controlers, etc.

It's like having only 2 PCI slots. I just hope SOYO resolved it on the DRAGON ULTRA (KT333CE)

Well, I own this board (DRAGON PLUS), and since I only use 2 PCI slots anyway, the card is rock stable. But it bugs me that I have paid for 5 PCI slots and I have only 2 of them with bus mastering. =[]

 

[bowie71]

Rmcky, don't start this thing again in here. We talk for solution in here, if you don't like your board and don't feel like to fix it in here then just throw it away your window and don't buy the same brand again.

Good Luck

 

[Rmcky]

Man, so much advice from so many junior members, I feel blessed!

Here's the rundown on what's wrong with this board copied from a response in another forum:

This board was cheap too, thank goodness. This TISU is the updated board from another board I used to own, the SY-7IS2. It was a decent board, but had a very flaky hardware monitoring chip. Unfortunately, this new board uses the same chip and is just as flaky. You put the CPU under load and the CPU temp goes up, but the board temp goes down. Not only can you not trust it, it appears to read the CPU temp several degrees warmer than either my TUSL2-C or ST6. Also, I experienced optical drive failures on the older board while overclocked. Had a DVD drive fail and always wondered if it was due to the odd PCI bus speed I was using.

However, that's not the main problem with this board, only a minor inconvenience. This board is touted by Soyo, several review sites, and, unfortunately, several members here as an avid overclocker. Well, it ain't. This experience is taken from two of these boards on different ends of the country.

You set it up at 133mhz FSB and it overclocks and runs nice and stable with Tualatin 1.0As, but you turn it off and cold boot it, it gives a CMOS checksum error and resets all of the BIOS settings to default. I have tried everything in my power to rectify this and as far as I can tell, there is no fix. It seems to have native support for the P3 Tualatins, but not for the Celeron Tualatins.

Some might say, oh that's just a minor inconvenience and one of the prices you pay to overclock, but I find it much more annoying than that. This is a fine a stable board, if you don't overclock, but that's not how it's advertised and it should be more competent than that. As I said, I picked this board up cheap, but I definitely got what I paid for with this one.

Rick

Oh BTW, thanks to everyone who offered such good advice and constructive critisim! It was taken in the spirit it was given, for sure.

 

[Turkey22]

Well maybe you shouldn't buy their cheap boards and pay for some of the better ones. You don't have to get the best but damn it's pretty cheap to be goin with crap boards when everything costs so little. Anew MB, proc, ram and even a case to go with it is less than $400 bucks top of the line. I've had experience with crappy boards (epox 8kta+ kt133) but I know that most of their boards are better than that. Just because me n my friend got crappy boards we didn't go out and say Epox sucks they make crap. We went out and said that particular board is crap. Attacking a whole company because of a few bad cheap boards is not very smart.

 

[Orbius]

I have a 7IS2 PIII board and it will be my last Soyo. The entire ownership experience I would classify as average. I guess I was spoiled by all the Softmenu settings of Abit and their constant support and BIOS upgrades, because in comparison Soyo doesnt seem to care.
For some reason my 7IS2 displays the CPU temperature as double of what it actually is. Needless to say it gave me a heart attack when I first installed it. After contacting Soyo tech support, they told me it was a BIOS problem and not to worry about it. Well since I've owned the board there has not been 1 bios update.
So I dont know if it was a problem with my specific board or if 7IS2's of some revision all have it, regardless Soyo doesnt seem to care about it.

And reading the Soyo Dragon story above, Soyo's seems to have a track record of creating boards with hardware problems. So the question is why buy Soyo? Exactly why, theres a ton of other board manufacturers who have a better track record of designing flawless boards and being better with updates.

The fact that I've owned Abit boards and would buy another one,
and the fact that I've owned Soyo boards and would not, should say something.

 

[Thalasi]

Not a prob with my with my Dragon Plus, which will be soon replaced by a Dragon Ultra.

 

[colindale]

?will be soon replaced by a Dragon Ultra?

You wont be sorry. it's a great board!.

Pierre

 

[Thalasi]

Yeah, I'm waitin' for the platinum.

 

[krazykilroy]

You know, I felt the same way with my Abit board that you do about Soyo, and just recently saw the error in my ways. I had the Abit KT7A-Raid for over a year, and It wouldn't be compatible with an nvidia card, and worst of all, I had no USB ports that were functional!!! I couldn't use my zip drive anymore!!! I contacted websites, and asked for help on this forum, Hired mobile tech guys to come to my house, (that's how I learned to build my current comp) and still nothing!! So I lived with it until the time I built my new system with a Tyan board. I decided to load XP on my formatted system while waiting for the Tyan board to come in and guess what? USB are not a problem!! Razzin-frazzin!!! So then I felt it was an inconsistency between the board and Win98 (since Abit had a whole spiel about how to make it functional with no success), so I decided to make a comp for my dad using the old Abit board and win98. (Hell, he doesn't need USB's) Would you believe that USB's worked for him too on Win98?? Needless to say I was happy, but pissed. I may have never went to all of the expense of upgrading my @#$! if my things would have worked in the first place!!!

 

[GregMal]

Well, I too, have purchased/installed the Soyo TISU motherboard in 01/02.
I also relied on the reviews at various web sites.
Though it's now working (Win98SE) without problems, it took quite awhile
to install it and get it working at all with the OS.
My prior upgrades have all gone relatively well with only minor problems.
This one took all weekend and 3 reinstalls of the OS.
Maybe it's just the TISU MB but I can tell you I also will not be
getting another Soyo. BTW I've previously worked with ASUS, Shuttle, Tekram,
and Biostar MBs............Greg

 

[Thalasi]

Well I had 2 slight problems when I upgraded my board from an IWill KK266-R to my current Soyo Dragon Plus. Upon any 3D rendering of any kind would the system would hang, a simple BIOS update fixed that. Also, every now and then my system would randomly restart without warning. It turned out to be my frickin Enermax 431Watt PSU. So now we've got an Antec TruePower 430Watt and it's runnin' perfectly.

Edit
I to have delt with quite a few other brands, running a small business and all.
I mainly stick to Asus and Gigabyte when I sell systems, but if the customer is fussy I have to go with what they want and deal with it later.

But out of all my experiences I have never encounted a board that equals the stability of my ABit BE6. It's definitely not the fastest board out there, being a few odd years old with a 440BX chipset, but it is a rock! I refuse to sell it as it currently resides in my "server" with a PII 400. I suppose someday I may upgrade the processor but right now there is very little need. In all the time I've had that board though I have not had one single problem with it. I cannot remember a single BSOD, system hang or any problem what so ever. Back when it was one of the best boards around (so said PC-Gamer lol) it was in my main machine, which ran Win98SE, no probs there. Now in the server it runs Win2K Advanced Server for months straight without a restart, still no probs. Anyway, thats my BE6.