P5W64 WS Professional Questions

[Veanie]

It has 4 x PCI-E. I will be using two for a Crossfire solution can the other 2 be used for any PCI-E cards or are they only for GPUs ? I intend to get a PCI-E RAID controller, would it work in one of the remaining slots ?

The ICH7R has 4 SATA ports, can all 4 drives be configured as a single RAID ? Have been caught out before with Asus boards where although they have 4 SATA ports the max number of disks per RAID was 2...

And lasty would there be much of an improvement getting a RAID controller over the inbuilt ICH7R ?

 

[Durzel]

It has 4 x PCI-E. I will be using two for a Crossfire solution can the other 2 be used for any PCI-E cards or are they only for GPUs ?

Any PCI-e card

I intend to get a PCI-E RAID controller, would it work in one of the remaining slots ?

Yup

The ICH7R has 4 SATA ports, can all 4 drives be configured as a single RAID ? Have been caught out before with Asus boards where although they have 4 SATA ports the max number of disks per RAID was 2...

Yup, I have 3 drives plugged into the ICH7R and they all show up on the RAID ROM and can be added to an array.

And lasty would there be much of an improvement getting a RAID controller over the inbuilt ICH7R ?

Depends what RAID version you're running really. I'm not sure you would see a discernable (i.e. real time) difference if you're running RAID0, as the ICH7R is already very good at this. If you were looking at RAID5 or RAID6 then a seperate card with its own cache would show discernable performnce benefits.

 

[easyrider]

@ Durzel

whats the max FSB you have had with this mobo?

Also a few people have reported temp erros in bios (showing high temps etc)

Any thing to report?

Thanks

I have added you to MSN

 

[Durzel]

I had 460 1:1 on air on a 7x multi without trying too hard, to be honest I'm probably not the best person to ask because I was building my new PC at work so didn't have an awful lot of time to mess about with it.

PC Probe read a good 8-10 degrees higher on the P5W64 than my P5W-DH did, but this was equalised by the fact that it was a lot closer to the Core Temp temperature, whereas on the P5W-DH Core Temp was always a good 10+ degrees higher.

Board overvolts nastily though, I guess it droops down close to whatever you've actually set it to in the BIOS - but at idle I was seeing a good 0.55v higher vCore in PC Probe than what I had set in the BIOS.

I'm very happy with it though so far, though I did nearly break it by putting too much dialetric grease in the socket for my Vapochill (it must've stopped the CPU making contact with the pins )

 

[G-Force]

Sorry to sound dumb.. although i have read about the raid settings somewhere, its not sticking into my head! Can someone summarise it for me as i'm too lazy to research it

 

[G-Force]

ok.. i managed to read up on it

 

[Durzel]

Just a heads up for anyone considering this board.. I clocked my PCI-e Freqency up to 110 and started getting SATA controller errors in Windows with my WD drives. YMMV though.