New computer almost finished- few questions

[Madcut]

I built my first computer last night and it went well. First boot up was smooth with no issues (which was a relief as I was expecting fireworks.) I checked to see that everything was detected in bios and they were. I installed windows 7, installed vga and mobo drivers, and got my internet working.

Here's my set up:

I7 930 cpu 2.8g
Asus p6x58d premium
Corsair dominator 3x2gb DDR3
Corsair H50 heatsink
Antec 900 case
Antec trueblue 750w ps
EVGA gtx 480
WD caviar black 1TB hdd
Windows 7 home premium oem.

So my questions at this point are:

How do I change my ram timings properly. In AI tweaker mode it shows ten numbers starting with 8-8-8-20-4, can't remember rest. My ram is supposed to be 8-8-8-24. So do I change the fourth number and leave the rest? Also I changed the dram speed to 1600mhz but it says something about a locked cpu. Can't tell if it changed speed or not.

Is there a progam in windows that reads what my ram is set to so I know it is right in bios?

My hard drive is showing as IDE but I'm using a sata 3 port with a 6gb/ second cord. Is this right or do I have to manually set it to sata 3?

Should I use the bios to overclock my cpu or the Asus TurboV software in windows?

Should I use mobo utilities for temp, power save, tests, memory settings, and cpu overclocking? Or should I use thirdparty programs?

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

CPUz will tell you all info about CPU and RAM.

I'm more or less an AMD guy, so specific settings I can't tell you. But I can help with the general stuff.

The timings it picked up are slightly faster (lower is better) so if it stays like that on the proper RAM speed, leave it there. You may have to increase the voltage to the RAM depending on the sticks, they should tell you how much they want.

The IDE thing is for people who suck at computers, expect everything to magically work and whatnot. It's more or less a hack so that SATA hard drives automatically show up as IDE drives so that windows XP can be installed without any actual effort so they don't have idiots calling their support lines. So you'll unfortunately have to fix it the other way yourself and set it to either RAID or AHCI (use RAID if you are EVER to likely use it), then reinstall windows (or try a repair I guess, I never did) because it's used to seeing that stuff in a different way.

My CPU is unlocked, but I'd say to use the BIOS if you're looking for a permanent stable overclock.

 

[Madcut]

Thanks False_Dmitry

Got my timings working correctly and the speed is correct.

Seems like bios was reading it as SATA II. I did a straight install without using SATA drivers. I'm getting mixed research on whether or not I had to install SATA drivers or not, as some people said Windows 7 will install it as such.

Would rather not have to reinstall windows, but if I f'd up then it's my problem.

 

[tritonofg]

Madcut,
You do not have to reinstall windows and I would not worry if your comp sees your hard drive as sataII as the best ssds push at 200mb / sec and the sat II saturated at 3000mb / sec

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

There isn't enough info to tell if that drive itself is SATA III or II. If it's II then even with the rest being III it won't matter.

You don't need SATA drivers for win7.

What I was referring to is an option in all recent mobos for how a drive will be treated and act like, regardless of what it originally picks it up as. With IDE mode you will lose some features and speed.

Windows in my experience has not booted after changing the modes at all. That's on multiple computers, and you would indeed have to reinstall for that.

@Tritonofg
The SATA standards are in bits not bytes. The margins are not quite that ridiculous.

 

[Madcut]

Best answer selected by Madcut.