Sabertooth 990FX HELP!!

[shang005]

Hi guys, newbie here hitting a wall with this new system I built.

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131736&cm_re=sabertooth_990fx-_-13-131-736-_-Product
Phenom II 955 black
Corsair Vengeance 2x4GB
Crucial M4 64GB SSD (Boot Drive running Windows 7 64 Bit)
WD Caviar black 1T 7200 SATA 6GB/S
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After installation, I did a few service / OS changes to optimize my SSD based on web reviews / guides and then tried to install drivers. It looked like all the drivers were installed, the JMicron and RealTek Audio/Lan. But my chipset drive seems to not work, when I tried to install it from the DVD, or a newer version downloaded from the Asus website (I ran it as admin). A command prompt opened, and 10 seconds later it disappeared and then nothing is happening, I'm assuming that this means there is something wrong, because aside from nothing popping up, there was no confirmation or prompt to restarted my computer. I called Asus but 2 of the tech I got were either too dumb to realize what I'm even asking, or just repeatedly told me to update my bios to the SAME VERSION I already had on the MoBo.

Long story short, any expert or owner of this particular board can shed some light as to what is happening when I tried to install the chipset drivers? Did it work in the background? How do I verify in windows that the chipset drivers have indeed been installed, or not.

 

[BIG DAD]

Ha...brother mine has done the same thing I dont know if it installed or not i think not because i have all kinds of problems with audio, memory, video......

 

[gumbology]

Hm. Found this while investigating my own sound issues.

I have that board w/ a 1090t@3.8, 2x4Gb 1866MHz rated mushkin, @1904, a pair of gtx275's, PCP&C silencer 750... running vista x64, cpu and gpus on a 3-block single loop, DD-MC-TDX, koolance fc blocks on cards, a T-line, and a DD-jingway dp1200, all in a black lian-li pc-60 plus, with an externally located phobya 1080 rad, w/ 9x yate loon's in push. Running boiled city tap w/ a silver strip. It's awesome. Oh, and it's pushin a 24" hd panel. It ran, in Vista, for about... 7-8 hours, @4.0GHz, 2000MHz ram, before crashing, but i just couldn't quite stabilize it at that speed, so i had to back it off a bit. It's been solid ever since.

EXCEPT for the fact that it has this horribly annoying sound issue, where it crackles and pops, loudly, sometimes, and seems to work fine, others. I'm not moving any cords, and none of them are damaged, and nothing is showing any "problems" with sound, in any of the places i've looked.

I don't recall having any trouble installing any of my mobo drivers...

I run a Line6 Pod UX1, worked perfectly with my previous board, (crosshair v1) and neither this, nor the onboard sound, seem to function without the crackle/pop. It's like... always at the beginnings of things. The beginning of youtube vids, the beginning of game sounds, such as right when a new screen or area loads... it does it for a bit, at first, then usually clears up, until the next "new" thing happens.

It's weird, and so far, seems to be the only problem. I'm not running SSD's or any "SATA-III" ("6.0Gb/s"), or anything "fancy," at all, other than the core stuff, really.

I really like the board. I plan to use it until something it can't do, matters more than everything it can. Which, with Zambezi, crossfire, SLI even dual-gpu crossfire/SLI... should be a while.

I hope i can fix the sound problem.

 

[b4w]

How did you go about getting your first SSD to be the boot drive and the Other HDD to be for data off the 6GB/s ports? Did you put the SSD on the 3 Gb/s ports? and if so how did you instal the drivers for those ports during your instaling of windows 7

 

[shang005]

I have the same problem, but only on windows 7 shutdowns, i hear a very brief crackling noise coming from my speakers. This is probably a board defect as it happens across all "speaker port" outlet on the board, whether via back panel or front panel using case connect (HD or AC). This is not a big deal though so I don't really care about that. And as far as I can tell after running 2 more secure erase and reinstall, the chipset drivers just installs in the background and gives no confirmation nor restart prompt. (that's dumb i know).. But after chipset driver executes, all unknown devices have designated a signed driver file, so I know for a fact that it worked, just in the background.

Hm. Found this while investigating my own sound issues.

I have that board w/ a 1090t@3.8, 2x4Gb 1866MHz rated mushkin, @1904, a pair of gtx275's, PCP&C silencer 750... running vista x64, cpu and gpus on a 3-block single loop, DD-MC-TDX, koolance fc blocks on cards, a T-line, and a DD-jingway dp1200, all in a black lian-li pc-60 plus, with an externally located phobya 1080 rad, w/ 9x yate loon's in push. Running boiled city tap w/ a silver strip. It's awesome. Oh, and it's pushin a 24" hd panel. It ran, in Vista, for about... 7-8 hours, @4.0GHz, 2000MHz ram, before crashing, but i just couldn't quite stabilize it at that speed, so i had to back it off a bit. It's been solid ever since.

EXCEPT for the fact that it has this horribly annoying sound issue, where it crackles and pops, loudly, sometimes, and seems to work fine, others. I'm not moving any cords, and none of them are damaged, and nothing is showing any "problems" with sound, in any of the places i've looked.

I don't recall having any trouble installing any of my mobo drivers...

I run a Line6 Pod UX1, worked perfectly with my previous board, (crosshair v1) and neither this, nor the onboard sound, seem to function without the crackle/pop. It's like... always at the beginnings of things. The beginning of youtube vids, the beginning of game sounds, such as right when a new screen or area loads... it does it for a bit, at first, then usually clears up, until the next "new" thing happens.

It's weird, and so far, seems to be the only problem. I'm not running SSD's or any "SATA-III" ("6.0Gb/s"), or anything "fancy," at all, other than the core stuff, really.

I really like the board. I plan to use it until something it can't do, matters more than everything it can. Which, with Zambezi, crossfire, SLI even dual-gpu crossfire/SLI... should be a while.

I hope i can fix the sound problem.

 

[shang005]

Hi, I have the crucial m4 64g sata III + a caviar black 1T 7200 sata III, these went on to sata III port 0 and 1 on the board, and a lite-on dvd went to the jMicron Sata II port 0 or whatever the top one is since there is only 2. Since jMicron is a stand alone onboard controller, there was no need for drivers installation for windows 7 even though it came with the drivers DVD. My exact steps to installing windows 7 to the SSD are as follow, and this is after trial and error and 2 secure erases (very sad)...

Plug SSD onto SataIII port 0, or the first one designated by the MoBo manual. Boot up and go into bios and make sure the SATAIII ports are set to AHCI mode, then reboot if changes are made into windows 7 installation. at the drive selection screen, there should be a HD displayed as "unallocated space", do not create partition or format that unallocated space, and just go straight to install. Windows will install, maybe roughly 4-6 mins. after the installation is complete, feel free to plug in any SATAIII or II additional drives into your MoBo, boot into windows and format those storage drives as you see fit. Standard fast format should suffice.

Once booted into windows for the first time, immediately go and check to see, in device manager under "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" if there is a entry named something like "Standard AHCI drivers 1.0", if you have that, that means your windows 7 correctly installed onto the SSD in AHCI mode, and you are in the clear to set your *** up. If it only says standard IDE, that means you fucked up and did not set SATA operating mode to AHCI, but instead had it on IDE, or Raid. Which means you are not left with either slower performance, or secure erase the SSD (hardware release electrons on the flash memory bank and restore to original factory performance settings), and repeat the installation, since SSD have limited write cycles, this is obviously bad.. So do it right the first time.

After do the standard SSD optimization that most forums / websites have. Relocate user's folder to storage drive and point to storage drive too. Anything less than a 7.3 for storage under windows performance indexing usually means you fucked up something, or your drive just sux.

To answer your particular question about which port to go for the drives, SSD goes to first port, then the rest doesn't matter at all. Obviously you wouldn't put a SATA 6GB into one of those jMicron 3GB ports.
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That being said, after extensive research and enduring calls to ASUS's techs, I've come to accept the fact the most optimal way is to use the MS standard AHCI drivers for the controller, instead of AMD AHCI drivers as they do not support TRIM(good for ssd), the read/write performance dropped about 10% across the board just by switching these 2 drivers, having AMD's a little ahead, but from what I read, TRIM > slight performance drop. Hopefully AMD will release one that supports TRIM soon, but as of right now, use the standard one installed by default from the windows 7 installation. *that means after your chipset drivers intall, you need to go in and manually revert the ATA/ATAPI controller driver to MS 1.0. Hope all this helps.

How did you go about getting your first SSD to be the boot drive and the Other HDD to be for data off the 6GB/s ports? Did you put the SSD on the 3 Gb/s ports? and if so how did you instal the drivers for those ports during your instaling of windows 7

 

[b4w]

Hi, What if I set the SATA III ports to Raid 1 since i want to mirror everything across 2 drives, including the OS. And this is using HDD not SSD.

 

[shang005]

If you have two identical mechanical drives and no SSD, of course it is your only option since you want a raid 1 mirroring set up, but that will offer absolutely no performance gain of any sort as you are essentially writing to just one disc, and the other one can be ignored, or vice-versa, only offers data protection. But yes, set the SATA III ports, or just the first 4, to raid, and set your drives up using the raid config. I did this one time to performance compare 2 caviar 1TB raid 0 vs. the new crucial m4 so I know the setup is very easy and straight forward.

Hi, What if I set the SATA III ports to Raid 1 since i want to mirror everything across 2 drives, including the OS. And this is using HDD not SSD.

 

[Vandroiy]

Bumping this...

I have actually not installed the chipset driver because I suspect it of having wrecked the installation last time I tried. I am writing a backup as I speak and will then try again.

The audio noise issue is probably on all of the Sabertooth 990FX boards. Seriously, I couldn't stand the Realtek thing and its "smart" driver longer than a few minutes and got myself a Xonar D2X sound card. That's what expansion slots are good for, they could've left it out for all I care.

I also think they should've killed the JMicron controllers and just wired one or two of the good ports to eSATA instead. My eSATA maxes out at about 100 MB/s... that's not SATA 2, that's slower than SATA 1! Maybe it's the drive hotswapper I'm using, but these JMicron controllers are suspicious.

Backup finished now. I will now again try to install the chipset drivers and tell you if the installation dies when I do.

 

[Vandroiy]

The chipset driver installer is hanging for quite a while now. I/O lamp giving a repeating blink code of "short - long".

I think the installation I'm typing from will die now. Let's hope the Windows Backup can do its job and restore.

Now the question remains -- what is the chipset driver good for even? I see all devices, the system works fine for all I can tell -- until I install that driver and the system gets destroyed, often not surviving the next reboot. This happened on multiple installations, I even used different hard drive controllers because I had suspected them.

Anyways, brb reverting from backup.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey