SOYO P4VGA any good?

N

neisius

Gawd
Joined
Mar 11, 2004
Messages
783
My girlfriend's dad's motherboard burned up...I mean realy burned up. So it my job to put the parts back together.
I found on www.tigerdirect.com they have a SOYO P4VGA for free after rebate. So what's up with this board? Will my girlfriend's dad hate me for putting a cheap board in? :rolleyes:

The board the burned is a soyo "p4I fire dragon"
with a P4 1.8A GHz
512mb DDR
TNT2 32mb

so what you think?
 
My experience with Soyo has always been bad. Their boards have a high failure rate and their quality is pretty bad. Not to mention their color schemes are ghey.

One board we received came without the retention clips for the memory sockets. They weren't merely broken. They weren't ever installed and weren't in the box. Not to mention several of them have had PCI slots fail and we've had alot of DOA's with them.

Mixed models of course. Not all the same batch/models.

I convinced the place where I work to stop buying that shit.
 
I had a Soyo board once and experienced no problems. Get it.
 
Originally posted by Odigo
I had a Soyo board once and experienced no problems. Get it.
Click to expand...
It's on the way ;)

I have had 3 Abit boards in 3 different computers all die within a month of eachother and an asus die a few months after that. So anything can happen with any brand...It did worry me a little that the Soyo fire dragon actually burst into flames. Maybe a Soyo with the VIA chipset will be more fire resistant :D
 
I've never seen an Asus motherboard die. Except when someone plugged a SCSI zip drive into the parallel port while the system was running.

Abit I can see that. I have had a few Abit boards and they've never lasted.
 
I'm still leery of that deal. TigerDirect has never gotten decent ratings, as far as resellers are concerned. And you'll have to pay their regular price just to even get that board, and you'll have to mail-in a rebate form that may never be processed on time. So you'll be screwed out of the price of the motherboard.

And even with all that trouble that you'll have to go through to get that motherboard and your rebate check, it still isn't worth it. It is based on an outdated VIA P4M266A chipset, which supports only PC2100 DDR memory - and only in a single-channel configuration. Furthermore, it lacks support for HyperThreading technology, and the maximum supported FSB speed is 533MHz (133MHz actual). Add to that the integrated video that sucks up resources even if you use an AGP card to disable the integrated video, and you'll end up with a system that performs worse than your old system.

And whatever motherboard you get, don't reuse that old TNT2 card on that new motherboard! That card theoretically supports AGP 4x, but its operating voltage is fixed at 3.3V! And that old P4I motherboard's AGP slot only supports 1.5V operation! No wonder why your girlfriend's dad's old motherboard burned up. Instead, get him a decent, up-to-date low-end video card to go along with that motherboard upgrade.
 
Originally posted by E4g1e
I'm still leery of that deal. TigerDirect has never gotten decent ratings, as far as resellers are concerned. And you'll have to pay their regular price just to even get that board, and you'll have to mail-in a rebate form that may never be processed on time. So you'll be screwed out of the price of the motherboard.

And even with all that trouble that you'll have to go through to get that motherboard and your rebate check, it still isn't worth it. It is based on an outdated VIA P4M266A chipset, which supports only PC2100 DDR memory - and only in a single-channel configuration. Furthermore, it lacks support for HyperThreading technology, and the maximum supported FSB speed is 533MHz (133MHz actual). Add to that the integrated video that sucks up resources even if you use an AGP card to disable the integrated video, and you'll end up with a system that performs worse than your old system.

And whatever motherboard you get, don't reuse that old TNT2 card on that new motherboard! That card theoretically supports AGP 4x, but its operating voltage is fixed at 3.3V! And that old P4I motherboard's AGP slot only supports 1.5V operation! No wonder why your girlfriend's dad's old motherboard burned up. Instead, get him a decent, up-to-date low-end video card to go along with that motherboard upgrade.
Click to expand...
I saw on one of the web deals pages that TigerDirect had 12000 positive reviews ;)
The rebates have to be postmarked within 1-2months so I think I'll do ok.
This isn't for a powerhouse system. I was told to make it work again for as little $ as possible...Free is very little $ :rolleyes:
Interesting about the TNT2...I guess I'll use the onboard video...and the TNT2 can go in my PII 333 junk system :p
 
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