P965 Boards

[mexpak]

My friend is on his second board, right now the Gigabyte DS3, and nothing we've tried will get his DVD drive out of PIO mode.

It's been nearly a month since he first built his system, and still can't use it effectively due to all these PIO problems. Are there any good P965 based boards that don't use Jmicron for the IDE channel? He just wants his computer to work at this point.

 

[krose]

Look at this board. From the specs "EZ-IDE: Two IDE interface (for 2 devices) from onboard SiI3811A SATA-IDE converter for driver-free IDE" Sounds like a great alternative to the Jmicron. Available at the Egg.

 

[Heidfirst]

abit's IB9 http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=334
uses an ITE controller instead (gives 2 channels).
It's a new board & a budget 1 at that so what kind of overclocking it will have ...

 

[mexpak]

Cool, thanks for the suggestions guys.

I'll have my buddy check'em out. Shame he's had so much trouble, all these driver issues or whatever it may be make it feel like an old VIA board I had.

 

[mikedice]

Anybody have any more info on the Epox board? Does it overclock well? Seems to have a good feature set for the price ($125):

ICH8R for RAID support
solid caps
One PCI Express (x4) connector for extra PCI-E VGA in GLI (Graphics Link Interface) mode
Gb Ethernet from Realtek RTL8111B PCI-E (x1) controller
Realtek ALC883 (with rear panel SPDIF Optical output)

 

[krose]

I just got the Epox and it needs some BIOS work. On my board if I try to raise the FSB it always sets to 420 over a certain FSB. 300 worked fine but 350 and up did this. I didn't try over 420. The BIOS goes up to 510.

There was a new BIOS released so I decided to flash it. I always flash in DOS using a Win98 boot disk that creates a RAM drive. I copy the BIOS file and AWDFlash to the RAM drive and flash from there to eliminate any floppy read problems. I've never had a bad flash with this method. Well there's a first time for everything. The flash completed but the computer froze on the press F1 to exit prompt; I rebooted and now the BIOS is corrupt as it will not boot to the BIOS. So until I get the chip reprogrammed I can't give you any additional info.

I believe the board has potential if the FSB problem is addressed. The Vdimm goes to +0.75 in 0.05v increments, Vcore goes to +0.4v in 0.0125v increments and the northbridge voltage goes to +0.3v in 0.1v increments. There are only the 4 basic memory timings available. It's not a real tweaker's board, but the EZ-IDE actually works! It certainly is cheap enough for what it offers.

 

[Fox5]

You could also get an IDE to SATA adapter. I've got one, didn't have much luck with it though, eventually managed to get my jmicron controller working perfectly in IDE mode after playing around with a ton of bios settings.