Best z68 setup

[Sonny73N]

Hi guys, I have my newly build only around 7 weeks but I have decided to upgrade my motherboard. Mainly because USB problems on my current one, the Gigabyte GA-Z68M-D2H which I got totally based on excellent reviews and seemed like a good budget board at the time. My new board GA-Z68XP-UD3P will arrive sometime at noon tomorrow. I currently have the i5-2500k, 90GB Corsair Force3, 2x4GB 1333MHz GSkill memory Cas7, OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w, HIS Radeon 6770 and Zalman 9500AT. I'll be using Windows 7 Ultimate x64. What I don't understand is that I saw on the UD3P that it has Marvel controller. How about Intel controller? Why is that Marvel chip had been added on there?

I use my system mainly for Photoshop and video encoding. I have 2 external USB drives for back up. I had AHCI configured on the D2H but I didn't see in BIOS any other option for using Marvel or Intel driver. I'd seen the Intel and Marvel drivers on Gigabyte download support page for the UD3P that instruct to press F6 to load driver from floppy (?). I don't have floppy drive but do I need to install one of those driver before installing Windows?

I do want to overclock the i5 a bit, to the safe limit of heat which it can takes. So what is the best setup for my system on this new MB? AHCI or IDE? What about those confusing drivers? Can you guys point me some direction. Thanks in advance.

 

[shtoq]

I don't know all answers, but regarding the controller, you still have the 'standard' controller and this board features 2 extra Sata ports that are on a marvel controller.
I don't know where you checked for drivers, but I can find drivers for the Marvel controller on the gigabyte website: http://download.gigabyte.ru/driver/mb_driver_marvell_sata_controller.exe

 

[Sonny73N]

Do you mean that I have to load one of those drivers? Is it before installing Windows or after?

Can someone give me some detail about this?

 

[danraies]

Your motherboard has four SATA 3.0gbps ports and four SATA 6.0gbps ports. The SATA 3.0gbps ports and two of the SATA 6.0gbps ports use the Intel controller and the other two SATA 6.0gbps ports use the Marvell controller. The Z68 chipset only offers a limited amount of bandwidth for SATA connections so motherboard manufacturers use the Marvell controller to add extras. Your motherboard manual will tell you which ports use which controllers but if I had to guess I'd say that the grey ports use the Marvell controller. Benchmarks tend to show that the Marvell controller underperforms compared to the Intel controller (although I don't understand this perfectly) so the general strategy is to use the Marvell ports last.

You're going to want to plug your boot drive into one of the Intel 6.0gbps ports (assuming it's the SSD) and then install windows as normal. Then when you're installing the drivers for the motherboard (usb ports, audio drivers, network drivers, etc) you'll install a driver for the marvell controller.

You want to use AHCI to boot from the SSD - there's not really another choice. I don't know about the Gigabyte bios but in my bios (ASUS) if you want to use a RAID you have to set the SATA configuration to RAID mode and that's the only time you would use anything other than AHCI. In this case, any drive that is not a part of a RAID will default to AHCI mode.

I'm not an expert on the Gigabyte boards but you shouldn't need a floppy.

 

[Sonny73N]

Best answer selected by Sonny73N.