GA-P35-DQ6 Setup Issues

[vonmayr]

I have this motherboard installed in a system with an E6500 processor. Everything works pretty well except for two things:

1) Everytime I get into Windows it detects the audio driver as "new hardware". I have repeatedly installed the drivers from the driver disk but the audio still doesn't work and I still get the annoying messages every time I boot up.

2) I used the ESATA bracket and plugged the 2 SATA connectors into the purple SATA slots on the board (the ones that are serviced by the GIGABYTE ASIC instead of the Northbridge. I installed the RAID driver from the driver disk and it works "partially". About halfway through any transfer, it hangs up, the data rate goes to zero, and then eventually the transfer times out. It starts out working fine. The ESATA is connected to a LaCie d2 Quadra external hard drive for backup.

Any suggestions to how to troubleshoot/kill these problems would be welcome. Other than these minor issues, the motherboard works very well and is quite an update in speed from my old 3.6 GHz P4.

 

[jeditim]

1 - I have the board and have no audio issues so I can't help.

2 - Did you try connecting to the Northbridge SATA headers instead of the Gigabyte? What about using the ESATA headers that are on the board already versus the bracket?

Tim

 

[vonmayr]

Solved both problems.

The ESATA worked when on the southbridge connectors. When I contacted Gigabyte, they told me that the proper BIOS setting for the gigabyte SATA controller was IDE instead of the AHCI that I had selected. Once that was fixed, the ESATA drive works fine.

The Audio was a much more difficult problem to work and get the answers to. The manual directs you to install the microsoft HD Audio driver first. If it is installed at all, the realtek audio driver will not install. If you have this problem, go to control panel:system:hardwareevice manager. Run the device manager and find the "system devices" branch of the tree and uninstall the microsoft HD audio driver. Once that is done the provided Gigabyte disk correctly installed the realtek driver and activates the microsoft driver.

Now sound works fine!

 

[mis33]

Did you try to enable AHCI (NCQ) with your GA-P35-DQ6? This is supposed to improve HDD performance by optimizing disk accesses using NCQ. Most new HDD have this features.

So far, how do you like your MB? Would you buy it again?