My 'sunshine' story - Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum ed

Greetings,


I got my soyo kt333 wayyyyy back, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and I
could still convince myself that I looked younger than my actual age.

From day one it tried really hard to give me an ulcer and/or a heart attack.
No matter what I did I couldnt get I to run stable. I did not engage in any
kind of overclocking or other fancy stuff that them youngsters do.
For me overclocking means advancing your clock one hour come daylight
saving.
After searching around the net and usenet, I found out that 'a lot' of
people had had similar problems to my own. Only solution seemed to be
disabling the onboard sound. Already owning a Soundblaster sound card I
never intended to use the onboard sound anyway, so I disabled it. Now I
could actually get it to run for at little longer without freezing up or
crashing on me.
However everytime I tried using the fancy little front thingy, with the usb2
and card readers, everything would go sour on me again. So I disconnected
this one also, and disabled usb2, instead using a usb2 PCI card.

Now it actually ran smoothly. Untill i started playing games. A few of them
would make it crash or freeze up or blue screen and reboot. Given that this
was online rpgs, and it usually happened when the action was at its highest,
it very quickly became very annoying. So I started searching the net and
usenet again, and asking around. Most people talked about Graphic Card
driver issues or cpu temperatures or power supplies or bad ram. I thought
that maybe I could actually narrow down the problem, and started searching
for some test programs for each specific part. I got one for the cpu and one
for memory. I never got any further because the cpu test program would make
the computer reboot after approx one hour. I then changed the fsb from 133
to 100, and now the test program ran without a problem through the night.
All well and good, only problem being that I'd paid for a 2100+, not a
1500+.

Only thing I could think about with the cpu that I could do anything about
would be either a bigger psu or trying to lower the temperature. Before
doing anything to complicated or expensive, I decided to try something
simple first - cooling paste.
And presto, the the test program ran through the night with the fsb at 133
without crashing. Off course I had to do some more serious indepth testing,
so I spend most part of my sunday playing online games, and not once did it
freeze, crash or reboot.
And all it took was a 6$ purchase. And a couple of years of serious swearing
and cussing.

But now that the computer is actually running stable, its no fun anymore,
guess I'll have to get myself a new ulcerinducing mobo.

Any suggestions ??


Jann

 

Hi,

#But now that the computer is actually running stable, its no fun anymore,
#guess I'll have to get myself a new ulcerinducing mobo.

#Any suggestions ??

Any Soyo MB with a non-Intel chipset should fit the bill, the more features
the better (the better the ulcer, that is).

Ken.