Official Gigabyte DS3 Owners Thread

Are you talkign about the DS3 or the K8N in your Sig?

If its the K8N then you will be kinda stuck with having to use SATA Ports 3+4 cos you are clocking your PC in the SIG.

If you are talkign about the DS3 then I can say that it does not really matter.

I would go for the Purple ones myself, however, I have had nothign but trouble and problems when setting up RAID on the DS3.

I solved it by intergrating the drivers into the XP CD, but could I do it vie floppy? - Could I buggery.

Now, as to your suggestion of having XP on one Partition and Vista on another, and having the 2 drives raided... If somehting goes wrong, then you lose both XP and Vista and this is something I would never risk. Neither would a lot of people who know RAID.

I would suggest avoiding trying to RAID to be honest.

I Would also like to add that its not really worth the hassles. Sure, you will probably get a boost in speed, but its not THAT big a boost.
 
ok thanks. yea sorry the sig has nothing to do with it - its the pc a built 3 years ago when socket 754 cpus were new lol. the pc im woking on is my mates with a ds3 and dual core.

so what does it mean that the orange ones are intel and purple ones gigabyte? could you combine them all to have a 6 disk raid? (not that id bother lol)
 
mac said:
when socket 754 cpus were new lol.
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Oh dont!

The one system I splash out on is my DFI LanParty... and its a sodding 754!!!

Not that I am moaning. Its got a Newcastle 3000 up to 2.8 and has been running flawlessly ever since at a comfortable 2.4 in my daughters PC.

mac said:
so what does it mean that the orange ones are intel and purple ones gigabyte? could you combine them all to have a 6 disk raid? (not that id bother lol)
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Well, as the name really... The Intel ports are on an INTEL controler and the Gigabyte ones are on a Gigabyte controler.

I will need to verify WTF Im on about here, cos I have a stupid ammount of PCs and I often get confused...

..Hmm...

According to the Device Manager, I have 2 Intel controlers, one is a 2 port and the other is a 4-port... I might have somethign disabled in the BIOS, but looking down at my wires, it does look unlikely?

Anyway, I think OTTOMH that the ORANGE ports are from one controler and the purple ports are from another controler that is also sharing the IDE ports

Giving 4 devices per controler...

Primary and Secondary and of course on each of those, is a Master and a slave

Going against what many seem to believe, but SATA is only the same as IDE but with a different cable... Hence why all SATA controlers have 2 or 4 - even though the drives themselves may need to be MASTER, the controler still treats them as Master/Slave

Anyway when I did some messing about, I found the Purple ports seemed to be the better for C: when used as either AHCI or RAID ( You need to get the drivers right during the install or you will never get them right ) although the difference as small.

As for using all 6 ports, then sure... RAID conrollers these days do indeed allow a mixture of ports so I dont see why it wont?

I have a combi-Raid setup on my MSI Neo2 that I was piddling about with only a couple of days ago... Purely in a kind of cuiosity thing, but I had a pair of SATA Drives connected to SATA a pair of Seagate IDE Drives on the Mobo IDE and a bunch Hitachis on an SIS3114 Card in a PCI slot and this meant that I had drives spread over 3 controlers and they were all beign treated as one RAID array.

Didnt do much like, but I did enough for it to READ and WRITE some junk....

Wasnt overly impressed with it, but it showed potential I suppose... Should someone fancy doing such a thing maybe????
 
A2Z said:
haven't gone through the whole thread...

just wondering any other people had the problem with the DS4 where when they boot, fans would spin etc, but then it would just cut out, then reboot by itself again, but again just cut out, and keep doing this?
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Mine was doing the exact same thing and i have sent the board back for a replacement. I tried clearing the cmos and removing the battery to clear it but still done the same thing. Would have tried to update Bios (although why should i!) but i couldn't because of the fault.
Also, when it 1st done it i could see the screen saying "Bios Recovering......" and it kept saying that again and again switching on and off.
 
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ok im still trying to get over the general acceptance that raid isnt that quick, ok sure the raid im setting up is only two drives but even then if information is being written / read 50 50 between them then it should technicaly be twice as fast than a single drive of simlar rpm and size? and im sure its not being limited to the speed at which the cpu and ram can handle it either?

the other thing i dont get about raid is that the supposedly different raid controllers actualy exist if they are identical in functionality / performance - how come on my K8N my floppy drive controller isnt made by AMD, IDE 1 by ATI and IDE 2 by Nividia? i.e what has intel got to do with raid controllers anyway? :confused:

why does nothing ever make sense....
 
Just to clarify a few points -

The yellow ports are for the Intel ICH8 controller which does not have RAID capability. For RAID, you will need to use the purple jMicron controller ports (or upgrade to a DS4 which has the Intel ICH8R controller).

The jMicron controller is an add-on that apparently shares the PCI-E bus. This doesn't really hinder things much although it seems that burst speeds are lower when compared with some other controllers. That doesn't really mean much in real-world performance though.

how come on my K8N my floppy drive controller isnt made by AMD, IDE 1 by ATI and IDE 2 by Nividia? i.e what has intel got to do with raid controllers anyway?
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The motherboards are sold with a specific "chipset" - a complimentary set of components (Intel, Nvidia, VIA etc.). The chipset includes the northbridge, southbridge, disk and other controllers, ethernet, sound, etc. In the case of the DS3, the board is supplied with a basic Intel chipset that includes the ICH8 (non-RAID) controller. Gigabyte have added RAID and PATA capability by adding their own (jMicron) controller to the Intel chipset.
 
mac said:
ok sure the raid im setting up is only two drives but even then if information is being written / read 50 50 between them then it should technicaly be twice as fast than a single drive of simlar rpm and size?
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Technically yes.

Real world, not quite.

In reality, there are many controlers and many different HDs and some HDs work better with some controlers, and of course, some HDs also work badly with other controlers too, but on the face of it, you will be looking at about 150%-180% quite probably.

A RAID setup isnt going to double up the speed of everything... If the thru-put of a given drive, is 50MB/S for example, then sure, asking 50 from each drive and making up the 100MB/s wont be too much to ask, but what realistically happens, is thet the controler needs to work out which bit goes and comes from which drive and sends the data to the OS and the other way round so you lose some % of its potential speed.
There is also *** Access time too... This will be say 8 or 9 ms and this will be the same - the speed wont double on that at all, so with margins of error, the access time will actually be slower on a RAID setup then a single drive.

Im no expert, so I am probably wrong, but thats about the thick of it really.

Its a similar thing with SLI / XFIRE - If one card gives you 100FPS then surely a pair of them will give you 200FPS??? - No, quite often you'd be looking at 10 or 20% increase!!!
 
FatRakoon said:
Its a similar thing with SLI / XFIRE - If one card gives you 100FPS then surely a pair of them will give you 200FPS??? - No, quite often you'd be looking at 10 or 20% increase!!!
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ah, there goes my future plans for xfiring two x1950s :rolleyes: so is it the same principle for dual core cpus and dual cpus on the same board?
 
My system boots fine but i do get 2 high pitch beeps on boot. Not loud just realy high pitch, not like normal mobo beeps. The kinda high pitch sound that brings all the neighbourhood dogs running.


Anyone else get this ?
 
mac said:
ah, there goes my future plans for xfiring two x1950s :rolleyes: so is it the same principle for dual core cpus and dual cpus on the same board?
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Its probably not that bad, but recently, I knocked up a low-ish end SLI system, purely to just have a play more than taking it serious, and I ended up deciding not to bother, but then I got myself a Gigabyte 6600GT and a short while later, I just happened to see the very same card going for a song and it rekindled my plans.

Ended up wishing that I never bothered, because I got about 15-20% increase at best ( Different games gave differet results however )

I asked about this, and was told that the only real use of XFIRE/SLI was when you have 2 of the fastest card out there, and only then you can say that your setup is the fastest, but otherwise a good single card will be a better option.

Do it by all means, but only for the buzz of knowing your system is SLI / XFire and not for its speed.


Is it the same with DUAL CORE CPUS?
Hell no, that works on an entirely different idea...
Also there is one big myth that many seems to still be following...

With a Dualcore CPU, each core gets to run at its full pace.

So, for example:-

an AMD x2-3800 runs at 2.0Ghz

It has 2 cores, so you get 2 x 2.0Ghz

This does not make up 4Ghz ... It makes up 2 sets of 2.0Ghz

Now, A Winchester/Venice 3200 also runs at 2.0Ghz

So, if you had a program that does a specific job on the Venice in say 1 Minute exactly, then running that program on the x2-3800 will also take exactly 1 minute.

The difference being though, is that the x2-3800 can run that very same program twice, at the same time, and both the programs will be finished in 1 minute.

However, that said, many new programs do indeed know about Dual cores, and will make use of both cores, and if this program knows about dual cores and makes use of them both, then the program will then be finished in 30 seconds instead of the 1 minute.

This is NOT the same with HT CPUS however... They are awful and the CPU speed is pretty much halved ( But of course you get to use both halves ) so the program could even take up to 2 minutes to run.
 
is anyone else having problems getting this board to post? My first one would not spin up with the cpu installed. Th cpu fan went one spin and stooped. If you left it on it would cyle through that say every 20 seconds. Like it was trying to spin but couldnt. If i take the cpu out it spins ok. Just had a replacement board and it does the same thing.
 
That CPU fan behaviour is correct on default settings - it will only come on when the CPU reaches a certain temperature. You can change the settings in the BIOS so that the fan spins constantly if you like.

The continuous boot cycle is usually down to a board/memory problem and is solved for many by raising the VDIMM in the BIOS. This would indicate why you are having the same problem with a second board (assuming that you are using the same CPU and RAM).
 
I wonder if any one here can help,

I have a E6320 in a DS3P and 2Gb Geil PC6400C4 RAM with 2 Seagate 7200.10 500Gb hard drives (jumpers removed to run at SATA II) in RAID 1. everything at stock.

When I write large amounts of data onto or between drives, sometimes after 15 or so minutes I get a BSOD and then it reboots.

I have reinstalled the drivers, created the RAID array with the SATA jumpers at I and II speeds, but it still seems to happen.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Jack
 
ashagplz said:
is anyone else having problems getting this board to post? My first one would not spin up with the cpu installed. Th cpu fan went one spin and stooped. If you left it on it would cyle through that say every 20 seconds. Like it was trying to spin but couldnt. If i take the cpu out it spins ok. Just had a replacement board and it does the same thing.
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try resetting the cmos then plug back in and have another go, it did exactly the same thing on my machine until I reset the cmos
 
well I had a tinker last night and got to 400x8 giving me 3.2 ghz overclock. that's on the stock cooler with the fan set to run full speed in the bios. temp wise under normal windows browsing it was constant at 35'. will do some stress testing and benchies.

the memory was left at 400, not sure if it's worth pushing it or not ?

the bios options seem to put a big increment on the memory as there are no dividers as such. you go from x2 in .5 increments so 2.5 is a big jump.
 
plasmahal said:
well I had a tinker last night and got to 400x8 giving me 3.2 ghz overclock. that's on the stock cooler with the fan set to run full speed in the bios. temp wise under normal windows browsing it was constant at 35'. will do some stress testing and benchies.

the memory was left at 400, not sure if it's worth pushing it or not ?

the bios options seem to put a big increment on the memory as there are no dividers as such. you go from x2 in .5 increments so 2.5 is a big jump.
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Your Ballistix should have no problems running at 1000mhz on the x2.5 memory multiplier.
 
I didn't touch the volts at all, but have not tested under full load yet.

I'll try the memory at 1000 then.


any suggestions for the volts ?


Or just up it .01 at a time ?
 
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