GA-EX58UD4P BIOS help

[cptblackeye]

Just put together my new Video editing rig amd need some help configuring the BIOS. Check sig for components. I updated the BIOS to F5. My main question concerns the settings for the SATA controllers and clearing CMOS. The MOBO has a clear CMOS button on the back. To clear the CMOS do I need to turn off the power and unplug it first or just shut down. In the BIOS under Integrated peripherals I have the option to set "SATA RAID/AHCI" to Disabled, RAID, or AHCI. I don't plan on using raid. I also have the option under "Onboard SATA/IDE Device" to set Enabled or Disabled. Next is "Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode" to set as IDE, SATA, or RAID/IDE. Right now I only have the SATA Raptor and Samsung OEM SATA 22x DVD drives connected. When I connect my other drives they are SATA as well. I Have Windows 7 and am going to try it or Slipstream the X58 chipset into a XP Pro SP3 disk. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bilbat]

The settings depend upon which SATA connectors you use: the first setting pertains to the Intel ICH10R controlled (the picture in the manual is awful, but I think they're blue) ports (6); the second setting pertains to the GB (pretty sure, it's their standard jMicron) controlled pair (white, maybe?), as well as the IDE ports. I always recomment to everyone to set them for RAID, and load the drivers for both when installing OSs; just cause they're set to RAID doesn't mean you have to use RAID (now), but that way your options are open in the future; getting the drivers into the OS later is a major b&^%$; and, with them set to RAID, they support all functionality available: AHCI and S.M.A.R.T. - the only thing is, if you actually load up a RAID array, you give up access to the S.M.A.R.T. functions - not sure, but I believe the RAID controller software grabs them to monitor the health of the array(s) (which is why WD is making money selling RE3s to people who simply want a Caviar Black with some features turned off)...

GB GA-X48-DS5 w/f8a BIOS - Q9550 stepE0 @ 3.825Ghz:
8Gb (4x2) 1066 G.Skill F2-8500CL5D @ 1080 (DDR2-8640) 5-5-5-15 on 2.4(6:5)mult/1333strap...
4 150Gb WD Velociraptors in two RAID0 pair-OSs & swaps; 2 1Tb WD RE3s in RAID1-data; 1 Sg 1.5Tb backups...
Multiboot via BootIt NextGeneration:
VistaUltimateX86/VistaUltimateX64/XpProX86/XpProX64(courtesy of TechNet) ahh - will have to edit this, just dumped Xp64 in favor of a try at Win7x64...

 

[cptblackeye]

Thanks for the reply. I have the HDD and DVD drives connected to the Intel (blue) ports and the esata bracket ports connected to the Giga (white) ports. So what I should do is set the Bios in both places for RAID or SATA and at the begining of installing Win7 I should load the Intel Matrix setup drivers for ICH10R at that time and I sould be good to go.

 

[bilbat]

I'd set 'em both to RAID, and load both the Intel, and the GB/jMicron drivers; like I said - that way, you're 'covered' no matter what you eventually decide to do... I use one of my jMicrons as a front panel e-SATA, and don't ever intend to use them in a RAID array, but, whatever, the capability is there (and easily accessible - as I mentioned, getting the drivers in later is a mess); I was sure I'd never use water cooling; yet, here I am with a confusing jumble of blocks and fittings, boring holes into the basement and running tubing!

 

[cptblackeye]

I've got the Intel driver and am going get the GB drivers. I plan on using a USB drive to install these drivers at install. Any other thoughts or suggestions on this process. BTW - I used Killdisk the clean the Raptor for a clean install.

 

[bilbat]

Geeze, I can't tell you about USB for the drivers - I'm old school, and have to have a floppy on my development systems, anyway, to (believe it or don't) load copy protection for industrial controller programming packages, so I always just use floppy. It appears from the OS menu (at least in Vista and W7β) to be possible - the only gotcha that I can see is that you might need to enable 'Legacy USB Support' in the BIOS, which can, then, (unfortunately) cause other boot problems. Here's how I would procede: try it with legacy support off, and see if the OS loader can 'find' the drive; if not, try rebooting and enabling it, it should then be seen; if you have trouble at the first loader reboot, you won't have wasted too much time; then back up and do this - enable it to get the drivers loaded, then, when the loader does its' first re-boot, 'intercept' the BIOS with a 'del' key, and re-set it to disabled, and allow it to reboot - should be good. Xp may complicate this, as, I believe, it want's to 'see' the driver disks twice, with a boot in between; post back if this is a problem, and I'll try to figure out a suitable 'work-around'...

BTW - aren't Raptors/Velociraptors just lovely?? You can't believe the response they bring to a system in two RAID0 pairs, one for the OS, and one for the swap file... ;=)

 

[cptblackeye]

I love my Raptor. One of the reasons I'm trying to set this up properly is to take full advantage of its speed. Now a question about the boot USB. Do I put both the Intel and Jmicron drivers together in the root directory on the USB drive or do I put them in seperate folders. I've already extracted them to iaAHCI and so on as per Intels readme.

 

[bilbat]

Ack - I'm not really sure, but here's how I would do it: create two directories, and put each manufacurers' drivers in a seperate one; then, use the navigation feature in the loader to go to one, and then the other - the loader 'eliminates' some of them (well enough in Win7 to only leave one choice in both cases) - but I'm not certain of the mechanism; I think it should work in one 'glob', and just give you two choices - then you'd just repeat, selecting the other one - but I'm not sure... Wish I'd been asked this the day before yesterday - had to re-install W7 because BitDefender trashed my first install; had some other sequencing/driver problems I wanted to get straightened out properly too; if (god forbid, as I've already installed all twelve office programs, as well as VStudio) it goes to hell in the next day or so, I'll experiment with USB/putting all the drivers together, just so I know for sure in the future...

 

[cptblackeye]

Running Killdisk right now and will try it as one "glob" in the root directory. Will let you know how it comes out in about an hour. Have you done any HDTune benchmarks on running a single Raptor vs dual in a raid config.

 

[bilbat]

Nah - got too much actual work to do to mess with benchmarking - I leave that stuff to the gamers;=) I did pretty much optimize this when I did the build/integration; here's how it works:
Have two pair of RAID0 VR's (150s - a leettle bit faster that 300s), actually restrict their use to about the first (fastest) two-thirds to three-quarters of each (rest is unpartitioned);
First 10 meg of the first pair contains the EMBR/MBR swapper/boot manager, and is 'visible' to no one else;
Then, the first 36G on both pair is an extended partition containing two logical drives - a 24 first, for the 64 bit OSs (my only miscalculation in the setup - I reserved twice the memory size for swaps, plus the memory size for 'hibernate' file - not knowing that it's impossible to move the 'hibernate' off the OS' root drive, so all my swap partitions are 50% too large - but, IMHO, not worth going through the whole damned install again, just to tweak out the last iota of performance), followed by a 12 for the 32 bits (same dumb theory); the next partition is a 64 bit OS, and the next is smaller for the 32 bits; the boot manager makes all the HD0&1 partitions invisible to each OS, except its' own system partition, and a logical pair on the opposite drive, one of which contains its' swap (you can't hide a logical inside the extended, so they are both visible, but the HD's 'stroke' is still limited to the swap cylinders...

Ya know - laying this all out here made me think of something - the boot manager can 'slide' partitions; I could 1) boot four times & take the swaps off & redirect 'em to the boot root; 2) erase the extendeds; 3)re-create the extendeds, smaller (also found out 64's can't really benefit from more than RAM size of swap); 4) re-create the logicals inside the smaller extendeds; 5) 'slide' the bootables down to the new cylinder boundaries; and 6) re-boot each system, & move the swaps back to the new (smaller) logicals... Hmmm - bet it wouldn't take more than an afternoon... Hmmm... I knew there was a reason I answer posts here;=) I gotta go out in the garage and root out an old UPS... !

 

[cptblackeye]

I was just wondering if the RAID was worth it. I'm not a gamer unless you call Free Cell, Spider Solitare, and other Windows games being a gamer! Seriously , I do a lot of family home video stuff. I was planning on a Q9550 but I was at MCenter in Atlanta and they had the i7 920 for $229. After seeing the benchmarks with that CPU for Studio 12 which is what I use, I couldn't pass it up. As for the setup, I had to enable Legacy USB support and am doing the install now. Haven't reached the driver load option yet. This will be my 3rd install. Hope to get it right this time. My windows experience last time was a 6.0 with graphics and hard drive being the lowest.

 

[bilbat]

I can't guarantee that it's worth the $ spent - I think, for your purposes, you'll get a lot more bang by sticking with what you've got, making sure you're using s'ware that is optimized to use all the cores, and investing in max RAM for the board (I know the DDR3 is $$, but, hey, the economy needs the stimulus;=); for storage I'd just buy a fast 1TB - they're getting really cheap...

 

[bilbat]

bump...

 

[bilbat]

Well - this nagged at me, so I DLd SiSoft's Sandra, and ran you a few benchmarks; these are only reads, Sandra complained that she wanted an empty drive to run writes, and that was beyond the scope... If an empty partition would have sufficed, I could have formatted a swap partition, but a whole drive - ehn ehn...

First pair are V32 boot/swap on the second relative partitions:

Second pair are W7β boot/swap on the first relative partitions:

 

[cptblackeye]

Thanks for doing the benchmarks. I was curious about the performance increase of RAID. I don't plan on adding another Raptor for RAID, but instead upping my ram to 12 GB when the price goes down some. I'm still struggling with my SATA ports. I think I have it now. It was mostly my fault. It seems from another forum that the Intel (blue) SATA ports will only work in SATA mode with a 3.0 GB SATA drive and my Raptor is a 1st gen 1.5 GB version. I also realized I never removed the jumpers (duh!!) from both my Seagates effectively kepping them at 1.50 GB also. To add to the problems, my new Samsung DVD burner doesn't work properly. Fortunately I was in Atlanta yesterday and picked up an Optiarc and it works fine. Just finished Killdisk and am installing for the 5th %&(*ing time Not to mention the other 3 times of XP Pro. I'll post how it comes out.

 

[bilbat]

Actually - thank you for suggesting it! I knew this bear was about as fast as I could make it, without paying for a four or five hundred dollar dedicated RAID card, but I really didn't know how fast (other than the obvious subjective effect). I was even kinda surprised by the actual numbers. I agree, though, that for your video editing, more RAM is likely a better investment. When I'm doing inteface development, writing PLC logic, editing large AutoCAD schematics, and writing 'glue' in Visual Studio, I can tell the difference immediately between Vista 32 and 64 - 64 is much more responsive, obviously because it can keep all the working files in RAM w/o having to swap, almost at all...
The whole RAID card issue is interesting: I originally wanted to boot Ubuntu on this thing, and just use it for e-mail, web, and skyping - that way I'd never have to expose windoze partitions to an outside world that seems intent on discovering two new security holes in it per week; after fooling around with every loader variant and every bit of advice I could glean, and having blown away, not one, not two, but four RAID arrays (and, even at 4GHz, it takes a while to format a terabyte of RAID1) trying to get it to co-exist, I finally decided to bite the bullet, switch to a 3870x2 card to support four monitors and leave a PCIe open, and buy a RAID card, which Ubuntu has native support for... Fortunately, before I placed the fatal order, I came to my senses and realized that, with a cheap case that included a PSU, a microATX with cheap on-board video, a Celeron that I keep around just for burning BIOS when the actual CPU is not supported by the shipping BIOS, and the left-overs from 'speed-binning' my own RAM, I could build an 'Ubuntu box' for way less than half what it would cost for the RAID card, much less replacing the video subsystem... One of those cool flashes, like the engineer who set out to improve the long-unchanged clothing iron, and wound up inventing 'wash&wear' wrinkle-resistant fabric!

 

[cptblackeye]

"Toto we're not Kansas" yet. I now have a case of the disapperaing HDD and external USB drive. I have a few ideas from other post as in the vanishing drive was connected via a molex to sata adapter (your theory which I believe to be possible). I also had used sata ports randomly as in I used Intel ports 1 & 3 and GBports also. I saw one post where their issue was solved by using the ports in squential order. I also noticed that this seemed to happen after installing the GB install disk. This will all have to wait for another day though

 

[bilbat]

GBs are known for being notoriously picky about USB; if you want to boot from one, you've pretty much got to enable 'Legacy USB Support'; bit, enabling it causes a whole series of other problems, including nasty 're-boot loops'. I also wonder if all the MOLEX/SATA power adapters are made by one firm in Elbonia; now I've got a small pile of defective ones with two different brand names...

 

[cptblackeye]

Fortunately I also have a floppy drive that I keep around for just such an occasion. Last night I hit the Raptor twice with Killdisk and cleared the CMOS before each pass of Killdisk. Just got home from work and am giving it a go with XP pro SP3 that I slipstreamed in the Intel Matrix drivers. I have the Raptor on Intel connector 0, 750GB on connector 1, 320GB on connector 2, and DVD on connector 4. Took out the SATA power adapter and connected the Molex to my Raptor as it has dual options for power. Cleared CMOS again before starting OS install. I set "SATA/RAID" to AHCI. Enabled "Native IDE". Enabled "Onboard SATA/IDE Device", and set Controller to AHCI. Right now it is formatting at 70% and is showing
F: Partition1 [New (Raw)] 143078 MB (143078 MB free)
on 143087 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on iaStor [MBR].
I think iaStor is my ICH10R chipset driver. Once I get everything working with XP then I will know it is me and not the MB then I'll try Win7 beta again

 

[bilbat]

Yup, iaStore is Intel; sounds like progress ;=)

Win7β is a challenge; took me three installs, (not counting the one BitDefender blew away by creating a &^%$ unknown account named BitDefenderComm, with a password from nowhere, that didn't show up, at all, in account manager!) to get it sequenced and right... So far - so good, have two recalcitrant apps - BitDefender won't update definitions, even if I dl 'em manually - obviously, a registry difference - gotta capture some error messages; and PaintShop Pro X won't authorize - I think it's botching some XML code; but, for an early beta (and x64, yet) it's not bad. Runs Acad, all my logic designers, Studio, and all twelve Office apps like a champ - and - noticeably faster than V64 on a similar partition! Also, beta drivers for my vid card (Hauppage 2250), and the HDHomeRun both seem to have loaded OK; now, to fire up MC and see if they're really recognized correctly!

 

[cptblackeye]

Even though it loaded with the iaStore, the hard drives still show up as IDE under disk drive details in device manager. So I moved the Raptor to the jmicron port and started over and now the Raptor shows up as a SATA drive but no such luck on the Intel ports with the Seagates. I really don't want to send the board back because I really don't know whether or not it is defective. I consider myself intermediate level for computer skills in the arera of building and repairing. I've built about 10 boxes over the last five years without any issues that I couldn't clear up. I really don't want to spend much more time on this issue if there is not a significant performance hit by running in IDE mode. It just frustrates me that I can't get it right. Your thoughts on performance difference would be greatly appreciated. BTW - I lost my sound after all of my windows updates. Something to work on (Yea!).

 

[cptblackeye]

SATA issue resolved. As it turns out Windows device manager inaccurately reports the HDD as IDE. When I open the Intel Matrix Storage Console under advanced mode it reports both Seagates "Current Serial Transfer Mode as Generation 2". Intels support site states
"While the Serial ATA controller may be operating at a higher transfer speed, it may claim to be operating in a slower parallel ATA transfer mode. All versions of Windows prior to Windows Server 2003 have support for Emulating Parallel ATA mode. For additional information refer to Serial ATA in the Microsoft Operating System Environment.*"
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/CS-020811.htm
That being said I can now move on with the sound issue which I'll try reinstalling the Realtec drivers from Gigabyte's site. Thanks for all of your insight and help.

 

[bilbat]

Hey, always welcome...
This exchange exemplifies why I answer questions here; I was pleased to have found out my actual disk transfer rates; and, a 'sideways' thought showed me how to correct my initial error in sizing my swap partitions - it only took a couple hours (and no risk) to fix; my only regret is that I hadn't run the benchmark before the fix - then I'd know quantitatively what it was worth!

 

[cptblackeye]

Good news! Windows 7 is up and running without any issues at this point. My new speakers (M-Audio) were the cause of my sound issue. I unplugged them and replugged and voila! - sound.