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

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: vzmr82
Do you think there is a possibility of having 1 or the 2 disks with problems?

Eventually I should move the contents of the volume to another disk, make that bootable and kill the RAID to perform individual analysis of the disks...

I"m curious....did you take all the defaults when you set up the raid volume in the post/setup procedure?

 

[felony]

Lots of reading..didn't make it all the way through though..

seems like users are still struggling to find a good set of ddr2(800) ram for this board?

Any suggestions? I am not planning on OCing, just want some good stable ram to work with this board and a new e6600.

there is a list of acceptable ram here - http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/Mem...ort/motherboard_memory_ga-965g-ds3.pdf

These dont work??!!

thanks
dan

 

[stillkicking]

Felony, I just finished building a new system the day before yesterday with this board. Mine came from NewEgg and it had BIOS version 7 on it. I went with 2 GBs of Corsair 6400 memory 5-5-5-12. The system immediately posted with no memory hassles of any kind. I haven't tried overclocking anything yet because I'm shot from the time it took to wire things together in the Antec P180 case I bought. UNREAL mess. Plus, I still can't figure out how to get into the overclocking section of the BIOS. The manual, and people on the message boards, all say to hit Crtl-F1 when you are in BIOS but that only brings up the same list of F keys that hitting F1 alone does. And doing this combo in the initial post screen results in nothing helping. Maybe in a few more days I'll get serious about it.

 

[felony]

stillkicking...

thanks so much for the response. been busy with school and have a few days to order this stuff and am in a rush to find some products that match.. will definatly look into your setup!

thanks again and keep us(me) updated!

dan

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: stillkicking
The manual, and people on the message boards, all say to hit Crtl-F1 when you are in BIOS but that only brings up the same list of F keys that hitting F1 alone does. And doing this combo in the initial post screen results in nothing helping. Maybe in a few more days I'll get serious about it.

If you go to the main bios screen and hit Ctrl-F1 you will see the screen flash and re-display the same menu. At this point when you click on the motherboard intelligent tweaker option, you will see there are a lot more options that have been unlocked for access. There is also one other thing unlocked by it, on the pci tab, there is an interrupt setting that can be adjusted now.

You need to do the ctrl-F1 everytime you enter the bios to unlock these options.

 

[felony]

stillkicking - so something like this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145590

 

[Roguestar]

That's a good deal at the moment but I'd suggest you read this thread to know your options .

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=28&threadid=1966035&enterthread=y

 

[mrVW]

DS3 with an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum under Windows Vista RTM ... sound works for the first 20 sounds then fails If I test my 5.1 speaker system using the Visa Speaker Configuration it works for 2 rounds then starts to go silent.

Anyone else?

 

[Gary Key]

Originally posted by: redhawk56
They did have major issues with that Creative XFi soundcard. not sure if it is xfi or just xi.
Not sure if they got those fixed.
Hope Gary reads all this. He is our only hope of getting it passed to GB to the right people.

I am reading all of it tonight. I will have Gigabyte read it tomorrow.

 

[stillkicking]

Felony, that is the memory that I bought. It has gone up $9 in the last week or so but the board has come down $15. Go figure.

Redhawk, thanks for the help in finding the "hidden" BIOS settings. The entire list of options look pretty intense for someone like me who has never OC'd. I tried just playing around with Gigabyte's all-in-one where they adjust everything for you. After the first two steps up I then ran CPU-Z and found the CPU speed to be essentially the same at 2.4 in each case. I thought it was suppose to rise. By the third step the board would no longer post past a certain point so I went back to default. On another message board they have a fairly detailed procedure for OCing this obard so I will play around some more next week.

Something that has surprised me is the temp reading for my processor. SppedFan lists it at 25C or slightly more after hours of running at a normal mode. The case is 35C. If I reboot and go into the BIOS page I find the same temps. I was expecting temps MUCH higher from everything I have read. No complaints, I'm just surprised. I am with the stock fan and in an Antec P180 case with stock fans on low.

 

[EKTELESTES]

guys, in the official Gigabyte page it says that P965-DS3 REV. 2, IS "QUAD CORE OPTIMIZED" , while the REV. 1 is "QUAD CORE READY". Is that the only difference between the 2 revisions ? and what exactly do they mean by "optimized" ??

The same is true for the DS4 REVISION 2, but I can't see any "S3" REVISION 2, so are they going to release an "S3" Revision 2?


If anyone has that information, please let us know... ^^

 

[Conky]

Originally posted by: stillkicking
Felony, that is the memory that I bought. It has gone up $9 in the last week or so but the board has come down $15. Go figure.

Redhawk, thanks for the help in finding the "hidden" BIOS settings. The entire list of options look pretty intense for someone like me who has never OC'd. I tried just playing around with Gigabyte's all-in-one where they adjust everything for you. After the first two steps up I then ran CPU-Z and found the CPU speed to be essentially the same at 2.4 in each case. I thought it was suppose to rise. By the third step the board would no longer post past a certain point so I went back to default. On another message board they have a fairly detailed procedure for OCing this obard so I will play around some more next week.

Something that has surprised me is the temp reading for my processor. SppedFan lists it at 25C or slightly more after hours of running at a normal mode. The case is 35C. If I reboot and go into the BIOS page I find the same temps. I was expecting temps MUCH higher from everything I have read. No complaints, I'm just surprised. I am with the stock fan and in an Antec P180 case with stock fans on low.

If your case temp is 35C then your CPU is higher than that... this is how it works. SpeedFan is obviously not picking up the right sensor for your cpu... in fact, it sounds like your sensors may be reversed. I suggest trying some other programs to find out what's really going on inside your system.

 

[redhawk56]

If your case temp is 35C then your CPU is higher than that... this is how it works. SpeedFan is obviously not picking up the right sensor for your cpu... in fact, it sounds like your sensors may be reversed. I suggest trying some other programs to find out what's really going on inside your system.

I would try that new coretemp program or the intel TAT.

They are both made for the C2D processors.

 

[Metaluna]

I've been having a real nightmare trying to get my 965P-S3 (i.e. not DS3) to recognize all my SATA/IDE drives reliably. I have 3 SATA hard drives and 2 PATA DVD writers in the system. The symptoms vary all over the place so it's really hard to narrow down the cause. Sometimes after a cold boot (I usually leave my machine off during the day and power it up at night), one or more of the HD's just won't be there in the BIOS. This happens about every other day. Other times, a drive will just disappear in the middle of some activity in XP, often causing a blue screen. This usually happens during heavy multitasking, usually in conjunction with some kind of multimedia app running (media player, dvd player, jpg viewer).

The wierd thing is that, once a drive has disappeared, nothing seems to bring it back. Even a cold reboot doesn't help, though I suspect that if I left the system off for an extended period (several hours) it would change things. About the only thing that can resurrect the missing drive is to physically move the SATA cable to a different controller for a while, until it eventually fails there, then move it back. The *really* wierd thing is that I've even tried installing a third-party PCIe SATA card based on a totally different chipset (Silicon Image SIL3132) which has its own BIOS. This card seems to have been "infected" by the same problem!

I have tried every combination of drives and controllers I can think of (to the point where I'm concerned about wearing out my SATA cables). The most reliable configuration so far has been to put the HD's on the ICH8 and the two DVD writers on the JMicron PATA port (I have tried IDE->SATA converters but they don't help). The HD's are a Maxtor 6B300S0, Maxtor 7L300S0, and a Western Digital WD4000KS RE16. The WD seems a bit more reliable than the Maxtors but I've had it disappear as well. The optical drives are a BenQ 1650 and Sony G120A (OEM Liteon 165P6S)

Has anyone else had a problem like this? I have the latest S3 BIOS (F6) which has the same release date as F7 on the DS3. I've heard that the DS3 beta BIOS (F8i) has updated firmware for the ICH8 and JMicron. Does anyone know if it's safe to use DS3 firmware on the S3, or if it will help?

I'm running a non-overclocked E6600 with 2GB of Patriot DDR2 667 memory. I don't know what chips these DIMMs use but I'm not OC'ing so I'm hoping that doesn't matter.

I've tried swapping power supplies, which didn't help. Right now I'm running Memtest86. If that doesn't turn up anything, I'm wondering if it's time to RMA this dog.

 

[vailr]

Metaluna:
Maybe the chipset is overheating? Try re-seating the passive cooler with some fresh heat sink paste.
Or even replace the stock heatsink with a Thermalright or Swiftech chipset/fan cooler.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: vailr
Metaluna:
Maybe the chipset is overheating? Try re-seating the passive cooler with some fresh heat sink paste.
Or even replace the stock heatsink with a Thermalright or Swiftech chipset/fan cooler.

You can't be sure, but I rather doubt it. He said he isn't overclocking. The gigabyte sata II controller controls all the IDE drives. The Sata connections are split between the ICH8 and the GB Sata II. The northbridge is the only one that really gets warm on that board and that wouldn't have anything to do with this.

He said he tried them on both and they failed in both places. I am curious about the exact Specs of your power supply???

 

[Metaluna]

The original PSU was a Seasonic Super Silencer 400W, which is rated at 22A@12V, 30A@5V, and 28A@3.3V. I replaced it with a Seasonic S12 600W which is rated at 18A@12V1, 18A@12V2 (not used), 30A@5V, and 30A@3.3V.

One thing did occur to me that my HSF is a Scythe Ninja, which is one of those vertical heatpipe coolers that doesn't direct much air down at the motherboard. I could try rigging up a fan to blow down across the motherboard and see if that helps. As I mentioned though, sometimes the problem occurs on a cold start after the system has been shut down for hours. I wonder if it could be some kind of power sequencing problem where the motherboard is switching the hard drives on and off (like it does with the fans) and confusing them.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: Metaluna
The original PSU was a Seasonic Super Silencer 400W, which is rated at 22A@12V, 30A@5V, and 28A@3.3V. I replaced it with a Seasonic S12 600W which is rated at 18A@12V1, 18A@12V2 (not used), 30A@5V, and 30A@3.3V.

One thing did occur to me that my HSF is a Scythe Ninja, which is one of those vertical heatpipe coolers that doesn't direct much air down at the motherboard. I could try rigging up a fan to blow down across the motherboard and see if that helps. As I mentioned though, sometimes the problem occurs on a cold start after the system has been shut down for hours. I wonder if it could be some kind of power sequencing problem where the motherboard is switching the hard drives on and off (like it does with the fans) and confusing them.

You can try it but I really dont' think this had anything to do with temps.

You might try one optical and one hard drive and see if that fails. Then add an optical and another hard drive. It would not beyond the realm of possibility for one of the drives or cables to be failing intermittantly and causing the problem to look like something else.

If that doesn't solve anything....what bios is your board. I dont' remember if you said?

 

[noasdi]

I am experiencing random reboots of my system. It will shutdown and immediatly restart. Sometimes it goes to windows other times it reboots again immediatly and will do this until I turn the PSU off.
The machine was running just fine for 2 days after I put it together. I encountered this problem after I plugged in my old 120 gb drive on the ide channel to transfer some files off to the new sata drive. Windows found the old drive just fine and started to move the files. After 20 min or so it reset itself and I have been having that issue since. I am getting no windows errors in the log when it happens.
I dont believe that anything is overheating as I kept a close watch on the temps and the CPU never went above 75 farenheit. The northbridge, cpu heatsink, videocard heatsink, and power supply were slightly warm to the touch immediatly after one of the resets after being on for 40 mins. There is no pattern to the resets it seems random. I am not sure what my bios revison is. I just got the board on the 12/08. I will look when I get home from work.
I have removed the old HD but still am having the problem. I am not OCing anything at the moment. The system was running fine until I plugged in the other HD. Any help would be appreciated! My system specs are as follows.
*Intel E6600 Conroe
*Gigabyte 965p-DS3
*2 Gigs of GSkill DDR2-800 ram
*WD SATA HD 320Gigs
*XFX Nvidia 7950 card 512 meg ram
*Toshiba DVD burner
*600W PSU

 

[imaheadcase]

Revison 2.0 of the DS3/DS4/DS6 are out now. They are more expensive naturally. But they have some changes.. The DS3 has Firewire now and some other changes.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: imaheadcase
Revison 2.0 of the DS3/DS4/DS6 are out now. They are more expensive naturally. But they have some changes.. The DS3 has Firewire now and some other changes.

You never answered my question. What was your point about Vista?

 

[vzmr82]

Originally posted by: redhawk56

Originally posted by: vzmr82
Do you think there is a possibility of having 1 or the 2 disks with problems?

Eventually I should move the contents of the volume to another disk, make that bootable and kill the RAID to perform individual analysis of the disks...

I"m curious....did you take all the defaults when you set up the raid volume in the post/setup procedure?

Well, I think I solved my problem. I suspected that when running HDTach, and the DGIndex program, something was also competing for accessing the disk, so:

First, I deleted most of the background programs. Anti-virus, Bluetooth, printer drivers, Activesync, almost everything, even some Creative programs for the Audigy sound card - this proved my thoughts. DGIndex took 35 seconds running on the Raid volume...

Then what I had to do was to find out which program was causing this. I first used the trial and error but I soon changed strategy: the Windows Task Manager, on the Processes tab can show all I/O Reads & Writes counters in real time. So I started HDTach I watched for threads also doing I/O and found the guilty on: a Sagent4.exe, which is an EPSON utility that I don't need to have it running.

I deleted the exe file, after backing it up, and voila - a nice performing system up and running. DS3/E6600 really rocks in OC.

Thanks redhawk56 for your help.

 

[redhawk56]

Originally posted by: vzmr82

Originally posted by: redhawk56

Originally posted by: vzmr82

Thanks redhawk56 for your help.

Great news. Nice work yourself.

Enjoy!!

 

[imaheadcase]

Originally posted by: redhawk56

Originally posted by: imaheadcase
Revison 2.0 of the DS3/DS4/DS6 are out now. They are more expensive naturally. But they have some changes.. The DS3 has Firewire now and some other changes.

You never answered my question. What was your point about Vista?

Your post on xteremesystems forum about vista i was referring to.

 

[tastyratz]

guys I have a ds3 rev 2.0
The only board I have for comparison is the one i got first by accident (doh!) which was the 965G 1.0. Comparing the 2 is where I get this so if it was already that way on the ds3 sorry im goin from what I have.

It was shipped to my by newegg and it didnt cost me any more. I didnt ask for it it just came that way.
there is no onboard firewire still.

the rectangle backplate you put on your motherboard now has a pretty silkscreen and matt background making everything clearly labeled. It has a breakaway port for firewire so id imagine it is for cost savings to use with another board.


the ds3 2.0 has a newer straight finned northbridge heatsink instead of that stupid wavey crown shaped do nothing one.
there are 4 fan headers now. No more picking your 2 favorite fans.

labeling looks to be changed on the silkscreen, little easier for things like the front pin header.

ships with f7 bios

same slots for pci/pcix1/x16/etc

still has the freakin stupid front audio connector on the BACK of the board where no FRONT connector is made to reach.

so far spending 5 min overclocking i have my e6400@ 3.2ghz stable 400 fsb 1.4vcore, I havent really tweaked around with it to get any higher as im going to bed now. Currently running orthos for 20 min stable @ 131f on my corsair nautilus watercooling setup. Im sure ill play with everything over the next few days to see what else I can milk out of it, but not bad for a blind -shoot-it-50-mhz-at-a-time-till-its-not-stable type of approach.

Im having problems with my silicon images 0680 raid pci ide card - seems real finnicky. theres a good chance its dead, but theres a good chance its just giving me trouble in both my 965g, and 965p boards... anyone else having that issue?