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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on November 30, 2001
Company: Soyo
Product: K7V
Dragon Plus motherboard
Find
low Motherboard
prices here.
RAID
As mentioned before, the chip (a Promise
Fasttrak 100 lite) is very similar to that used by Asus and
MSI. This reaches to the extent that the Dragon Plus has
exactly the same problem that Asus had with the A7V, two of
the PCI slots share an interrupt request with the
controller, and as such the board is very unstable when some
cards, notably sound cards, are used in these slots. For
reference, the slots are four and five. The problems were
more intense when using Videologic's
Sonic Fury than Creative's
Sound Blaster Live. The detection at post is quick and
painless, and can always be disabled in the BIOS. The
Promise chip is slightly different from that used on the MSI
K7T Pro2 R(U), as that controller does not support any
non-RAID modes, and has a slower startup detection. However
the Array Setup software is identical to that which MSI use.
The controller supports both striping and mirroring,
although not spanning.
The motherboard manual has a large
section in it specifically for RAID setup, detailing
features and benefits, compatibility, jumper settings,
Driver and setup in Windows, and any other settings to be
used.
DDR RAM
DDR is becoming something of an industry
buzzword, surrounded by hype. The technology serves to
deliver data on both sides of a cycle. Traditionally, to
transfer a piece of data (either 0 or 1) would take one
whole clock cycle, measured in Hertz (Hz). DDR allows data
to be transferred on the falling edge of the cycle, thereby
doubling the throughput. However the number of cycles (Hz)
remains the same. Contrary to popular belief, SDRAM is still
only available in 100 MHz 133 MHz or 150 MHz versions.
The new DDR versions of this memory are
not sold as PC200, PC266, PC300 or PC333, as one might
logically guess, but instead as PC1600, PC2100, PC2400 and
PC2700. This confusing number is the bandwidth, which can be
worked out by multiplying the effective frequency
(200/266/300/333) by the bits (64) and dividing the end
result by the number of bits per byte (8). All of which
leaves us wanting to call it PC200, PC266 or PC300.
The Dragon Plus features three DDR DIMM
slots for PC1600, PC2100, PC2400 & PC2700, and possibly
for PC3200 and PC3700 (neither of the latter are available
yet). Whilst it is totally feasible to run memory at these
higher speeds, indeed the BIOS supports up to a massive
233(466)Mhz, there is no option to set the PCI divider to
1/5 or the AGP divider to 2/5. This means PCI cards would
have to run at up to 58Mhz and AGP cards up to 116Mhz if you
were to want to run your memory at PC3700 speeds. At these
settings, it is quite possible (even probable) to do some
damage. However, it can be done, usually with the help of
extreme cooling like LN2.
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