[Results] Soyo P4VTE

[archimed]

Just a quick note. I've spent 2 solid days trying to get a complete, working, system - with very little luck unfortunately. Here are my results so someone else might not have to waste their time with this mobo setup..

 

Specs:

Soyo P4VTE (VIA PT800 chipset, VIA SATA) motherboard

2 x 512mb Kingston HyperX

2 x 80gb Seagate SATA drives

Onboard ethernet (VIA Rhine II possibly?)

Onboard sound

Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT (256)

 

Results:

 

- I found an interesting caveat with installing OSX(86) on SATA-based RAID arrays: you *cannot* have both a RAID array and an MBR. The OS X Disk Utility will only allow you to use GUID partition tables if you want to build a RAID array. My solution was to not use any RAID support, and instead used the drives as separate 80gb volumes.

- I had to put my DVD-ROM on the primary IDE channel as "master" or the installer would error out with the classic 'waiting for root...' error

- My system was *extremely* finicky when it came to the uphuck 1.3 driver/patches. I went through about 3 hours of kernel panics before I found out that it absolutely required the 'remove IntelCPUPowerManagement' option in the installer.

- Universal Kernel #1 seemed to work. But there were so many other variables that changed between kernel reinstalls that I can't say for sure whether #2 or #3 were better (or worse).

-The SATA install was flawless for this particular motherboard. I installed the VIA SATA drivers in uphuck 1.3

- Radeon drivers of any kind resulted in black screens, reboots, white screens, you name it. I had to start by installing *no* native video drivers, and relied on the basic VESA driver.

- After a lot of experimenting, I managed to get the Callisto driver working for my Radeon so I could at least change resolutions.

- NONE of the AGPGart drivers worked for my particular system. I could not get either Core Image (CI) or Quartz Extreme (QE) to work for this board. My best guess is that AGPGart does not support the VIA AGP->PCI bus on this motherboard/chipset

- USB mass storage devices did not work for either Jas 10.4.8 or uphuck 1.3 on my system. This was unfortunate, because it made transferring files between my systems extremely painful... which leads me to the next problem...

- The onboard ethernet did not work out of the box either. By the time I found out about the VIA Rhine II driver, I had already given up on this system. It's possible that they work for this system, but I cannot confirm or deny this.

- Onboard sound *did* seem to work out-of-the-box, although I did not test whether it was single or two channel audio.

 

Overall: Don't waste your time with the P4VTE. There just isn't enough driver support for the plethora of VIA chipsets that this board uses.

 

Comments welcome. Thanks MUCH to Jas, Uphuck, and the thousands of hours other members have spent documenting their install strategies. I'm going to buy a different motherboard tomorrow and give this another go.

[willzo]

For the Soyo P4VTE I found it also to be very hard to deal with the iDeneb install disk. I eventually tried iAtoks which worked .. almost perfectly.

 

I got lan to work, and sound in one channel. I also found that the USB channels were a pain in the ass to get working, they would work sometimes and others they wouldn't, but than again I can't even get windows xp to work with the 2.0 usb ports.....

 

So overall it will work with the correct drivers.