Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra

[benwellis]

I have just bought a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra motherboard to build a new system for myself, and have a few questions that i hope someone will be able to help out on. Fistly, is the onboard ultra320 scsi linked to the pci bus, as if i had a few scsi drives connected to it, it would surely saturate the bus, also are the ide raid 3+4 ports connected to the pci bus, for the same reason as above! And lastly, i think that the onboard serial ata ports are linked straight to the chipset, so they do not have the bandwidth problems as above, through the pci bus, am i right, or does that also share the pci bus. Thanks in advance!

 

[caseman]

I've emailed Gigabyte a number of times asking that very question... with no response ( in fact the their lack of support borders on aggressive and has forced me to choose another mobo manufacturer). However, according to the chipset design in the manual the SCSI controller sits on it's own dedicated second PCI bus. The 8KNXP review over at Anandtech (http://www.neoseeker.com/resourcelink.html?rlid=64107) also mentions the second PCI bus. In fact according to article, if you have a revision 2 board the SCSI sits on a PCI64 bus.

Now, this is the only mention of it I have seen on the dozen or so reviews I have read, so I can't swear to it, but at least it looks to be a good sign.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you actually get through to the people at Gigabyte.

 

[caseman]

By the way, is your set up working? What are your impressions of the board so far?

 

[benwellis]

No its not up and running yet, as i yet have still things to get for it, so far i have got a Thermaltake Xaser 2000 case, the GA-7KNXP Ultra mobo and 2 Maxtor Atlas 15k 18Gb drives. I did intend on getting a couple more of the Maxtors, but as i am still trying to find out if it is worth it due to the bus speed, i'm waiting a bit longer. I had a look at the review you pointed out to me in your post, very strange, as every other place i've looked at seems to point to the pci bus being 133mb/s and not 266mb/s as the review suggests. But as i'm still waiting for a reply grom Gigabyte, (not holding my breath) i'll have to wait. I did really want to get some more drives on the SATA and IDE Raid, but don't know whether they share the bus either.

 

[caseman]

The S-ATA and ATA connects directly to the ICH5R (southbridge) which has a bus threshold of 266MB/sec so no, it does not take part in the PCI bus per say. However if I read the ICH5R chipset diagram correctly the PCI bus connects to the ICH5R so what you have connected on the PCI slots will have a potential affect on the total bandwidth available to anything connected via ICH5R.