Originally posted by: Soul Colossus
For the P5B non-Deluxe, I found that the CD ASUS included -does not- have the ICH8 AHCI drivers (the vanilla uses ICH8, not ICH8R). I believe they're the ICH8R drivers only and it mislabels them as ICH8. When you do the F6 method above with the supposedly ICH8 drivers off of ASUS' CD, the drivers are installed fine but when you boot into Windows it ****** up as though you didn't have the drivers at all. What I ended up doing was booting up in IDE mode on the Intel SATA controller and installing the drivers for the JMicron controller (while it's enabled in AHCI mode in the CMOS). I then shut down, connect my HDD to the JMicron controller and VOILA I'm booting up in AHCI mode and SATA performance is finally normal.
I left the Intel SATA controller enabled in AHCI mode and when I checked it out in Device Manager, it only showed up as Unknown PCI Device. I tried manually installing a driver for it off of the CD, but absolutely no drivers on the disc matched the controller. It looks like ASUS never included the correct driver for Intel's ICH8 SATA controller and I couldn't find it on either ASUS' or Intel's sites. To this day it's still sitting there labeled as a PCI Device with no driver whatsoever. P5B vanilla users should just go with the JMicron controller, it works fine.
Originally posted by: FireChicken
Anybody hear of a P5B-E PLUS. ?I saw this in the ASUS bios download list but cant find any info on it
Originally posted by: BuddyHolly
I also connected my second half of my ATX connector on the motherboard by using a line off my Antec SP500 power supply. It is modular so I reconfigured my spare second PCI express video card power cord to work in the extra slots since my almost new power supply lacked an eight plug connector.
Originally posted by: BuddyHolly
Rigging a power supply bad news? Naaaa....suprisingly easy really. I cut up an old 20pin atx connector because I noticed it was keyed to fit the extra four pins that are usually covered up with the little gray cap. I then extraced four of the pins from my second PCI Express power cord and slipped them into my newly minted plug. This power supply is modular, so you plug or unplug what you want. Therefore my connection has a dedicated line just for the extra four pin plug. I checked the voltage and plugged it up. No problem to report. Newegg makes an adapter, but that just split the current four pin plug and does not provide the extra amps of my solution. I am going to order one of the adapters and wire it in using the two dedicated lines for each half so I will a have a true 8 pin plug.
Well, it didn't help anyway, so it was an hour wasted.
I did have some success with the board since then. I swapped in a Geforce 7600 card and still the same thing. Dropped the card to the second PCI express slot and danged if it didn't boot. Tested it all the way up to 6x450 and it ran perfectly. Then I noticed I had changed the DRAM frequency from 1:1 to auto. No idea when. As soon as I moved it to 1:1 I could no longer boot. Moved it back to auto and it works fine. Booted it up as 8x420 and it ran perfect for hours of gaming and encoding movies, then it locked up while installing the Asus motherboard monitor and would never reboot at the speed again. Dropped it back to 6x450 and runs perfect....
So, I kinda suspect the ram may be a bit screwey and maybe I am hitting a wall with the processor. One thing I have not tried is lowering the vcore voltage when at 8x420. I always run a lot of voltage with every processor I overclock, but maybe this one doesn't like it. I have tried it as high as 1.575 and it does not help.
Ideas?
Originally posted by: Fishy007
Yeah. It seems a bit screwy with my system. Firstly I had to open the case and clear the CMOS after I flashed in order to get the system to boot. Then Windows wouldn't boot properly. It turns out that I had to change all the memory settings in the BIOS back to "Auto" for it to boot. Since I was working just fine with manual settings before 0711, I have to assume the BIOS did something odd.
Now since I am working with 2 different brands of 533mhz ram, I'm willing to say it might be my RAM at fault...but everything worked fine up until this bios release.
Edit: I removed my Kingston RAM and things seem to be working again. I tried booting with Kingston only and got crashes. I'll do a memtest with the Kingston later tonight. I have a feeling that this bios release has screwed up the compatibility yet again.
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
It changed the way it works with memory, and mixing brands is not recommended anyhow. It basically fixed problems with some OCZ and other brands just totally not working.
Originally posted by: Fishy007
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
It changed the way it works with memory, and mixing brands is not recommended anyhow. It basically fixed problems with some OCZ and other brands just totally not working.
Well the point is I was having zero problems before this release. Reccommended or not, it worked wonderfully with every previous release. I'll probably just go back to the previous release.
Oh and the other point is that the Kingston ram (by itself) did not work at all.
Originally posted by: Caliginosity
Well, I disappeared for a little while and gave the new RC1 Vista build a try. Aside from some program compatibility issues, it ran like a dream (much better than XP, surprisingly enough).
Anyhow, to the meat of the topic. I reinstalled Windows XP on my system, did the F6 deal and placed in a floppy with my ACHI files so they would load up in XP. Went through the whole installation, then rebooted and switched my SATA configuration to ACHI. Rebooted again, began to log into windows (up to the boot screen), then got a bluescreen error message and immediately rebooted. This repeated until I manually changed my SATA configuration in the bios once again to IDE.
Now, I'm not exactly sure why the drivers didn't load from my floppy, but they are no where to be seen in my XP installation (did the windows search as well as tearing through my System32 folder manually for the iastor.sys file that should have been placed in there to allow ACHI configuration to work - but no luck). The only change that I did between Vista and reinstalling XP was to update to the new 711 bios (note that I didn't clear CMOS at first. I didn't seem to need to as unplugging the power cable and replugging it back in seemed to get my system to boot up again with the new 711 bios. However, after reinstalling XP I noticed on the ASUS site that it recommended clearing CMOS after installing the latest bios update, so I just now cleared CMOS, but I'm not sure if I should reinstall XP and hope that it will fix my problem with not being able to install the ACHI drivers from my floppy or not).
Any advice would be great, though I'm crossing my fingers that I don't have to reinstall XP again (did it like 4 times in a row trying to get those drivers to take).
[edit] Alright, it looks like I am going to have to reformat after all. I just looked up my chipset information with CPU-Z and it's listed as only ICH8 (which is a non-deluxe chipset) as opposed to ICH8R which is the deluxe chipset. That is the reason the driver disk isn't working in XP, because the operating system doesn't recognize that I have the correct chipset to take advantage of the ACHI configuration. Hopefully when I cleared the CMOS, it fixed the chipset recognition as well.