Jurys Back In Again

Some of us may remember that I'm the one who had the bad SK7 Dragon
board that I couldn't get to run any video card after trying a Radeon
8500LE and an Nvidia MX400. Instant crash on both. If you remember
Soyo contacted me from scanning this forum, so I sent my board, Radeon
8500LE, Ram and CPU (AMD Tbird 1.3 GHz) to Soyo. I promised to report
back with what happened.

Well, I got it back a week ago but I was busy building a new unit and
burning it in, etc. Okay, here's what happned:

After a couple of weeks I got a call from Soyo tech. They had
verified and duplicated my problem with the board crashing with the
video card. The card is good, I had built a unit using a Shuttle board
and the card ran like a champ. The tech guy said that they had
switched my card with a different 8500LE and it ran good. He couldn't
explain why either. So he sent me a K7V Dragon+ as a substitute
board.

Okay, I got the board in the mail. I pulled out the Shuttle board I
had been running and installed the Soyo board. As usual, I loosely
set the board inside the box, installed the V.Card (my Radeon 8500LE),
the same stick of RAM, same CPU with an upgraded heatsink fan. Hit the
power switch. Powered up, I got the BIOS screen. "Great!", thinks me.
So I finish screwing down the board, installed everything, etc., hit
power. Wouldn't boot, No Keyboard Detected. Huh??

I won't go into paragraphs of detail, but I did the usual "dismount
everything except the main stuff until I get boot, then reinstall 1x1,
etc." What I found out was that if I installed the center mounting
screws the board would not detect the keyboard/mouse. Must be
grounding out somehow. I had insulaters on the metal chassy mounts,
etc. No good. So I ended up using the four corner screws only, and
the board runs like a champ. It is using my original memory, Video
Card and CPU that were crashing the previous Soyo SK7.

Comparison with Shuttle AK39N:
The board is solid and runs good. To be honest, I don't see that it
offers anything that the Shuttle AK39N doesn't offer except RAID. The
Shuttle is very fast and rock solid, and costs $65 at Newegg. But the
Soyo board at this point is running very well. So now I have an extra
Shuttle board, so I must build another unit ;0)

My thanks to Soyo for following through. So I kept my promise and
reported back to you guys what happened.

In article <2059ce7e.0307050713.309f3ce5 RemoveThis @posting.google.com>,
whataboutbob5246 RemoveThis @yahoo.com says...
 > Some of us may remember that I'm the one who had the bad SK7 Dragon
 > board that I couldn't get to run any video card after trying a Radeon
 > 8500LE and an Nvidia MX400. Instant crash on both. If you remember
 > Soyo contacted me from scanning this forum, so I sent my board, Radeon
 > 8500LE, Ram and CPU (AMD Tbird 1.3 GHz) to Soyo. I promised to report
 > back with what happened.
 >
 > Well, I got it back a week ago but I was busy building a new unit and
 > burning it in, etc. Okay, here's what happned:
 >
 > After a couple of weeks I got a call from Soyo tech. They had
 > verified and duplicated my problem with the board crashing with the
 > video card. The card is good, I had built a unit using a Shuttle board
 > and the card ran like a champ. The tech guy said that they had
 > switched my card with a different 8500LE and it ran good. He couldn't
 > explain why either. So he sent me a K7V Dragon+ as a substitute
 > board.
 >
 > Okay, I got the board in the mail. I pulled out the Shuttle board I
 > had been running and installed the Soyo board. As usual, I loosely
 > set the board inside the box, installed the V.Card (my Radeon 8500LE),
 > the same stick of RAM, same CPU with an upgraded heatsink fan. Hit the
 > power switch. Powered up, I got the BIOS screen. "Great!", thinks me.
 > So I finish screwing down the board, installed everything, etc., hit
 > power. Wouldn't boot, No Keyboard Detected. Huh??
 >
 > I won't go into paragraphs of detail, but I did the usual "dismount
 > everything except the main stuff until I get boot, then reinstall 1x1,
 > etc." What I found out was that if I installed the center mounting
 > screws the board would not detect the keyboard/mouse. Must be
 > grounding out somehow. I had insulaters on the metal chassy mounts,
 > etc. No good. So I ended up using the four corner screws only, and
 > the board runs like a champ. It is using my original memory, Video
 > Card and CPU that were crashing the previous Soyo SK7.

You need to remove any mounting studs that do not line up with a
mounting hole and screw in the motherboard not just insulate them. Not
all boards use all the same holes.

Doug<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->