Small issue with Gigabyte 8KNXP non-Ultra

[Twitch]

I just finished building my Canterwood system and thought I would post regarding the one bug I have found.

I am running two Cuda V's in a RAID 0 using the IAA integrated RAID. I was having a bear of a time getting XP installed, and after about five tries, I finally figured out the problem and the workaround.

In the Award BIOS, it's necessary to select the Boot order of SCSI/RAID devices. Since there are three different RAID controllers on 8KNXP (two SATA and one PATA) I had to put the Intel RAID drivers first on the pecking order. Then, of course, I had to select "SCSI" as one of my "Boot" devices.

Initially, everything was fine. I hit CTRL-I during Intel's RAID setup to create the RAID volume, then hit F6 during XP's initial startup to load Intel's RAID drivers for Windows. Windows took the drivers without issue, I partitioned the array, and installation began. The problems started after the initial reboot.

Apparently, a soft-reboot of the 8KNXP causes the BIOS to "lose" the SCSI/RAID information. It took me a few tries to figure out that it was specifically the BIOS that was the problem, and not the RAID drivers. I did learn that if I turn the computer all the way off, rather than hitting reset or doing a reboot, the BIOS will correctly load the RAID device on the next power-up.

So, the short of it is: I cannot "restart" Windows. I have to actually "turn off" windows and then power back up in order for the BIOS to load the Intel RAID device so that XP knows to load the IAA drivers. Otherwise, the system will hang on boot-up.

I just thought I'd post this in case anyone else buys this motherboard. Other than that little annoyance, it is a great motherboard, and everything else came off without a hitch. The performance is terrific, and the board has a lot of great features. It is kind of a pain remembering to stop a software installation from automatically rebooting the system. Hopefully, Gigabyte will release a fix for this soon. These are the drawbacks to early adoption.



<font color=green>The Netherlands is where you go when you're too good for heaven.</font color=green> :tongue:

 

[Javic]

I have experienced this problem as well, but its not every time. It seems to be intermitten when it loses the RAID boot order. When this happens, you just go back into BIOS and reset it. Its a major pain in the ass, especially when you're first setting up the comp and rebooting alot. Hopefully Gigabyte will put out a new BIOS that will fix this issue soon.

Congrats on your new rig Twitch! Post some benchmarks when you have a chance, I'm curious to see how my system compares to a comparable one.

 

[Twitch]

Hey cool! Yeah, the problem may be intermittent, but it sure is a pain when you don't know exactly what's happening. At first, I was trying to install a WD 80 GIG PATA drive on the primary IDE controller with the RAID drive as the boot drive. This ended up being pretty much impossible. Now that I have everything running correctly and I know what the problem is, I think I can install the WD without too much difficulty. Anyway, here's my initial scores without tweaking:

PCMark2002: CPU Score: 7461
MEM Score: 9101
HDD Score: 1193

3DMark2001SE (ATI "Balanced" Settings): 17686
3DMark03 (ATI "Balanced" Settings): 5604

I obtained those scores after turning off Windows Restore option, which takes up some resources. I'm confident I can increase those scores 3-5% with some tweaking, and maybe 10% with some overclocking.

I don't care too much about extracting every last point from my benchmark scores. As long as my scores are healthy and indicate that everything is running as intended, I'm happy. And like I said, since I overcame the initial installation difficulties (and I've NEVER done a build without at least one or two problems) everything else has been gravy.


<font color=green>The Netherlands is where you go when you're too good for heaven.</font color=green> :tongue: