Red Hat 8.0 freezes with Soyo KT333 Dragon Plus

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello all.
Excuse the repost of parts of this info.  But I foolishly added this topic to 
my reply to Bryce's reply about my Mandrake install problems, and there was 
really no relevance to that.  It's a separate problem.

I just upgraded my system with a Soyo KT333 Dragon Plus motherboard, 
and either (a) I installed it incorrectly (b) it's defective (c) the 
components are incompatible (unlikely since I bought it as a bundle with CPU 
and RAM) or (d) the company's product brochure lies when they say it supports 
Linux.  Judging from Soyo's website (which I should've checked more 
thoroughly before ordering the thing, I guess) there's no reference to Linux 
except to one case where a person was removing it.

Anyway, this is the symptom:  Sometimes the system runs for a few hours, 
sometimes for 10-15 minutes.  It appears that it only hangs when the screen 
saver is on - probably not because of the screen saver, but because of some 
sort of related inactivity function.  I rebooted the machine and checked the 
"messages" files, and at the end there are a number of entries that say:

Dazed and confused, do you have an unsual power-saving mode enabled?

I tried to go into BIOS and turn the power-management stuff off, but there 
appears to be NO option to do so:  only to change between "S1" and "S3" 
functions, or both.  Is this crazy or what?  If I knew I couldn't turn off 
power management I wouldn't have bought this board.  (Political rant: forcing 
computers to "save power" is like telling peole they can't run their 
gas-powered lawnmowers when there's a coal-fired power plant next door.)

To add insult to injury, Soyo's email support form on their web page has 
about 15 fields, all of which are mandatory.  One is for the BIOS version 
number.  Nowhere on any of the BIOS screens does this number appear.  It 
doesn't appear at startup, and if it ever flashes to the screen during the 
boot process it's too quick to see.  Why would they have hidden the version 
number, or do you have to be running Microcrap to be able to see it?

I know that a person can load a new version of BIOS into flash, and that if 
you screw it up, you have to send it back to the company, so I'm a little 
reluctant to do that.  Do BIOS's sometimes have secret or hidden options?

Is there perhaps a good resource or website for secret BIOS tips of the 
masters?  I'm hoping not to need to send this sorry hunk of junk back to the 
vendor, but it's not looking good at this point.

Thanks,
Vaughn Treude