GIGABYTE GA-X58A UD3R performance and SATA connections

[DigitalDave]

Hello guys, i'm in a little bit of a pickle. I recently built a new gaming PC with GIGABYTEs awesome UD3R, but i've noticed quite a few problems with it. When i tried to install windows 7 from the DVD, it took around about 5-6mis to get to the option to install the OS. Then another 5 to get to the install location screen, in the end i just gave up (i had a faulty ISO so it wouldn't install anyway) but it takes some time for stuff to react, and its not in any means a slow machine. With a i7 930 @ 2.8ghz & 6GB of RAM. even when im inside windows, games take a while to start from the disc. reading custom PCs article on the board, it says somethiong about having the hard drive and the DVD drive into the wrong sata ports and therefore the wrong sata controllers. Anyone got any ideas? this is my first high end build and i want it to be as fast as possible, and the issue with the connections is driving me mad. If anyone could tell me which ports i should plug in my DVD drive & my F3 and what options to do in the bios, i would be eternaly grateful

Cheers in advance!

 

[geofelt]

Have you updated all the chipset drivers?

The UD3R has two 6gb sata ports, and 8 normal sata ports.
The 6gb sata ports are handled by an add-on chip, not the X58 chip. The value of 6gb sata will eventually show up when we get the 3rd or 4th gen of ssd's, but it makes little real difference now. The 6gb only applies to hard drive cache to sata data transfers. The savings are very small since the time is small to begin with, and most of the data will come from the platters, not the cache. If you are not using the 6gb controller now, you can disable support for it in the bios. This will reduce your bios boot initialization time.

I suggest that you attach both the DVD and the hard drive to the normal sata ports. Which ports you use does not really matter, but I would try to put your devices in ports 0 and 1 if you can.
Configure sata as AHCI(not IDE or RAID) in the bios. If you have not done this, a reinstallation of windows is the only easy way to change. This will also clear the way to attach a SSD which needs AHCI to use the trim command.