*** Official Gigabyte P965-DS3 Thread ***

[yiranhu]

Thanks rainypickles. I wish Gigabyte's bios will have this option built in. I really don't like to clutter my windows start up.

On a different note, can some explain the beeping a little bit on this mobo? I'm currently running 2.8 GHz with a 6300 at 1.30 volts (although I think the default 1.28 works also). The system has been running very stable for the 2 days now (just assembled 3 days ago!). I found that sometimes, when I change the CPU multiplier or change the voltage in BIOS and then restart, the board would beep a few times (rapid) and then turn off and turn back on. I thought that would mean the overclock is having issues but the board booted right up afterwards at the settings I just picked! Running in windows seems very stable too (no crashes with Orthos). I looked at the beep codes but didn't think any of the ones listed fit. Anybody has any opinion on this?

My system specs for reference:
DS3 + 6300 @ 400 FSB x 7 1.3 volts (stock cooling with 3 case fans) - ambient 16C Idle (core temp) = 33C Orthos = 57
GSkills CL4 2GB kit @ 800 4-4-4-12
WDC 250 SE16
CM ExtremePower 430.

 

[FightTest]

Out of curiosity are any/many of the people running at around 400FSB using any further cooling on the northbridge beyond the stock heatsink? I've heard a lot of people talking about how it gets super hot and I was just wondering if people just let it sit that way with no issues or if most people replaced/altered it.

I ordered a 40mm fan to stick on top of the NB heatsink just in case, as well as picking up a couple more 80mm case fans to increase airflow in my case. (I'm using the older version of this Aspire case which has 2 80mm fan slots in the front/back rather than the single 120mms in the one linked to, otherwise identical. It comes with one intake fan on the side and one exhaust fan on the top, so I'm planning on putting an intake 80 in the front and an exhaust in the rear to coincide with my Freezer 7 Pro.)

 

[yiranhu]

There's a temperature in Health Monitor called system (i don't know if this is NB temp)... mine says 31C under my current config and does not change under loading...

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: yiranhu
Thanks rainypickles. I wish Gigabyte's bios will have this option built in. I really don't like to clutter my windows start up.

My system specs for reference:
DS3 + 6300 @ 400 FSB x 7 1.3 volts (stock cooling with 3 case fans) - ambient 16C Idle (core temp) = 33C Orthos = 57
GSkills CL4 2GB kit @ 800 4-4-4-12
WDC 250 SE16
CM ExtremePower 430.

I have built systems with 4 different motherboard in the last 2 years and I don't know of any of them that have the functionality that you are asking for in the bios. If you don't like to clutter the windows startup, then start it manually. The fans will just be running at full speed until you do.

I am just curious, where do you live that your ambient air is 16c / 61f?

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: FightTest
Out of curiosity are any/many of the people running at around 400FSB using any further cooling on the northbridge beyond the stock heatsink? I've heard a lot of people talking about how it gets super hot and I was just wondering if people just let it sit that way with no issues or if most people replaced/altered it.

I ordered a 40mm fan to stick on top of the NB heatsink just in case, as well as picking up a couple more 80mm case fans to increase airflow in my case. (I'm using the older version of this Aspire case which has 2 80mm fan slots in the front/back rather than the single 120mms in the one linked to, otherwise identical. It comes with one intake fan on the side and one exhaust fan on the top, so I'm planning on putting an intake 80 in the front and an exhaust in the rear to coincide with my Freezer 7 Pro.)

I tried screwing a coolermaster 40mm to my northbridge and it didn't seem to help much. So I aimed an 80mm at it and that did the trick. I see a lot of people saying they should replace them because they get hot. I don't agree. If it is getting hot, then it is working and all you need to do is blow some air across it to take the hear away.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the front fan. Sometimes when that is an intake fan, it just blows the heat of your hard drives across your motherboard. That doesn't help anything. So I ended up making my front fan exhaust also. So I have the front on low blowing out, the back on low blowing out and the side on medium blowing in. That creates a little of a negative pressure situation for my video card zalman heatpipe to be able to draw air in over it from an open pci slot.
This setup lowered my motherboard temps, my hard drive temps, and my gpu temps. So you might experiment wtih it and see what happens.

The case fans are Antec tri-speed 120s by the way.

 

[yiranhu]

I live in a refrigerator... it's a little cramped but I just love the cold!

Am I being sarcastic? I don't really know...

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: yiranhu
I live in a refrigerator... it's a little cramped but I just love the cold!

Am I being sarcastic? I don't really know...

Well then I wouldn't worry about your temps. There are probably much more pressing problems for you to address.

 

[petebert]

just got mine, couple questions.

is there a general consesus on ICH8 vs. GA SATA2? I've got a single 7200rpm sata drive.

my cpu temp is listing as less then case temp, usually about 5c less, this cant be right, right?

and if anyone else has a problem with theirs, I got the PK gskill DDR2 800, their website says to set the voltage at +0.1 but I had to set it to +0.2 to be stable at the advertised 44412

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: petebert
just got mine, couple questions.

is there a general consesus on ICH8 vs. GA SATA2? I've got a single 7200rpm sata drive.

my cpu temp is listing as less then case temp, usually about 5c less, this cant be right, right?

and if anyone else has a problem with theirs, I got the PK gskill DDR2 800, their website says to set the voltage at +0.1 but I had to set it to +0.2 to be stable at the advertised 44412

Definitely put it on the Gigabyte Sata II controller. Set it for AHCI and you will get the best preformance. EDIT$$ You may need to load F6 drivers to do this. I don't remember....to much wine while cooking this afternoon. Does anyone remember this one?

On the ich8 you cant even run native sata and it runs like an ide in emulation mode.

What edit$$ LOL CPU do you have?

 

[petebert]

I've got a E6400 with stock hsf.

 

[petebert]

 

[petebert]

sorry about that, the work computer told me it was blocking me from posting so i tried it 3 different ways, apparently it still goes through when it says that

 

[mrayner]

[/quote]
Definitely put it on the Gigabyte Sata II controller. Set it for AHCI and you will get the best preformance. EDIT$$ You may need to load F6 drivers to do this. I don't remember....to much wine while cooking this afternoon. Does anyone remember this one?
[/quote]

FYI

I had mine on the other ports so decided to do a before and after comparison...

Here is the HDTach graph:

GRAPH

Blue is on ICH8 and set as IDE, Red is on GA SATA 2 controller with AHCI set....

Difference is not as large as some people seem to be making it out to be.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: mrayner

Definitely put it on the Gigabyte Sata II controller. Set it for AHCI and you will get the best preformance. EDIT$$ You may need to load F6 drivers to do this. I don't remember....to much wine while cooking this afternoon. Does anyone remember this one?
[/quote]

FYI

I had mine on the other ports so decided to do a before and after comparison...

Here is the HDTach graph:

GRAPH

Blue is on ICH8 and set as IDE, Red is on GA SATA 2 controller with AHCI set....

Difference is not as large as some people seem to be making it out to be.



[/quote]
According to your graph and seagates drive numbers, your Red drive is an IDE drive and the blue one is a Sata II drive. That wouldn't make a very good comparison.

 

[mrayner]

[/quote]
According to your graph and seagates drive numbers, your Red drive is an IDE drive and the blue one is a Sata II drive. That wouldn't make a very good comparison.
[/quote]

How do you figure that?
It clearly says SATA in red in the image....

Any way, thats just how windows if accessing the drive via the controller, thats the whole reason I wanted to test the drive....
Windows accesses them via different ways, but IT IS the same drive....

The Gigabyte controller is faster and would be the best choice for your HD, but just don't expect it to be tons faster.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: mrayner

According to your graph and seagates drive numbers, your Red drive is an IDE drive and the blue one is a Sata II drive. That wouldn't make a very good comparison.
[/quote]

How do you figure that?
It clearly says SATA in red in the image....

Any way, thats just how windows if accessing the drive via the controller, thats the whole reason I wanted to test the drive....
Windows accesses them via different ways, but IT IS the same drive....

The Gigabyte controller is faster and would be the best choice for your HD, but just don't expect it to be tons faster.
[/quote]


A 3320620A is an ata 100 drive
A 3320620AS is a Sata II drive

 

[Sniper82]

will this memory work on this board?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820227047

One reviewer says it won't work with P965 chipsets.

 

[Kamyk]

Originally posted by: redhawk56

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Here's another question. Assuming I forget about the RAID array, and just go with single drives:

Is there a performance difference b/t the ICH8 controller and the JMicron? I.E. if I have two HDs, and am copying b/t the two, would there be a performance diff b/t having both of them on the ICH8 or one on each controller?

There is a huge difference and I don't even have to test it to tell you that. The ICH8 wont even run in Native Sata mode. That means no AHCI and no NCQ and your Sata drives will run in IDE emulation and look like IDE drives to windows. I have one Sata I drive on my ICH8 and the speed is deplorable. That isn't Gigabytes fault by the way except to the extent that they could have put in an ICH8R controller. But that would have made the board much more expensive.

So we get to live with our trade offs LOL!!

#1 Redhawk56 why do you say that ich8 wont even run in native sata mode since there is 'sata port 0-3 native mode' enabled/disabled in BIOS ?
#2 Sandra 2007 indicates that my HDD is running under UDMA-5 Mode, but is UDMA-6 capable so current settings are not optimal. How to fix it ???

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: Kamyk

Originally posted by: redhawk56

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Here's another question. Assuming I forget about the RAID array, and just go with single drives:

Is there a performance difference b/t the ICH8 controller and the JMicron? I.E. if I have two HDs, and am copying b/t the two, would there be a performance diff b/t having both of them on the ICH8 or one on each controller?

There is a huge difference and I don't even have to test it to tell you that. The ICH8 wont even run in Native Sata mode. That means no AHCI and no NCQ and your Sata drives will run in IDE emulation and look like IDE drives to windows. I have one Sata I drive on my ICH8 and the speed is deplorable. That isn't Gigabytes fault by the way except to the extent that they could have put in an ICH8R controller. But that would have made the board much more expensive.

So we get to live with our trade offs LOL!!

#1 Redhawk56 why do you say that ich8 wont even run in native sata mode since there is 'sata port 0-3 native mode' enabled/disabled in BIOS ?
#2 Sandra 2007 indicates that my HDD is running under UDMA-5 Mode, but is UDMA-6 capable so current settings are not optimal. How to fix it ???

If you test it out and look at the drive in device manager, you will verify it yourself. The bios screens/options are misleading. Set up the drive in the bios for native sata on one of the ich8 ports and then look at it in windows. It shows up as a normal ide device.

This is nothing new by the way. No ich8 sata port will run in native sata mode, even on intel's own boards. The marketing and naming of the various ICHx southbridges is very misleading. When I first came across it with the ICH6 and contacted intel, it became clear they wanted to keep it as confusing as possible. They claim numerous options that are available with the ICHx family chips and then when you read the fine print, you realize that the only one that really gives you all of those options is the ICHx/R series.

That all being said, the bios switch for native sata probably controls how the controller talks to the drive but you can't really verify that in any document anywhere. But since the controller has to talk to windows in sata emulation mode/ide mode I think you lose most of the benefits. If you have ever seen a Sata drive running in real native sata mode and looked at it in the device manager, you would notice that it looks very different.

The best scenerio is to have a board with an ICH8R and then you get everything that you think you've paid for. I wasn't willing to pay for it because of the 2 ports that are available from the Jmicron controller.

 

[Kamyk]

So, all I have to do to get optimal mode and benefits from SATA is:

1. BIOS->Integrated Peripherals->OnBoard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode -> Changed to 'AHCI'
2. install GSATAII drivers
3. Reconnect HDD from orange port to blue port
Will it work ?

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: Kamyk
So, all I have to do to get optimal mode and benefits from SATA is:

1. BIOS->Integrated Peripherals->OnBoard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode -> Changed to 'AHCI'
2. install GSATAII drivers
3. Reconnect HDD from orange port to blue port
Will it work ?

That should do it. I can't be sure that you can do that without reinstalling windows though. Maybe Gary can tell you for sure.

 

[mrVW]

Has the F8 BIOS been released? Upgrade advice from F7? I'm running VISTA RTM on this system and figure I better keep up with BIOS updates. Sleep works OK except the cpu fan keeps a runnin?

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: mrVW
Has the F8 BIOS been released? Upgrade advice from F7? I'm running VISTA RTM on this system and figure I better keep up with BIOS updates. Sleep works OK except the cpu fan keeps a runnin?

First, I have no idea about Vista. I tried to load the final release code on this system and it got 30 seconds in and told me I was missing a driver. It was nice enough to tell me I could take out the CD to load it, or even load it via USB. But they didn't bother to tell me which driver they wanted. So my Vista ready machine wasn't so Vista ready afterall and I threw the CD in the trash. I have a feeling looking back on it that it didn't like my SataII windows drive being on the Jmicron controller and back then I wasn't even using Raid yet. So it will be a long time before I bother trying it again.

As for F8, I checked the GB servers this morning and they still have F7. It should be soon though from what I've heard. My system is running very stable on F8i, but I have a pentium D 920 running at 4ghz very stable.

There is an issue with sleep on mine too, In S3 it won't wake up anymore. That used to work on F7. I just fond that yesterday. I haven't tried S1 since a long time ago when it did not work for me.

 

[petebert]

the gskill tech support sent me a link to F8 beta, if anyone wants it I can put it up in a few hours when I get home and get to my email.

 

[mrayner]

Originally posted by: Kamyk
So, all I have to do to get optimal mode and benefits from SATA is:

1. BIOS->Integrated Peripherals->OnBoard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode -> Changed to 'AHCI'
2. install GSATAII drivers
3. Reconnect HDD from orange port to blue port
Will it work ?

This is exactly what I did, worked fine, no windows reinstall needed.