P6T Deluxe SAS Onboard

ajones32 · 31 Dec 2008 at 13:42

A couple of questions really.

How good is the onboard SAS controller.
Are SAS drives worth the cost.
Will Vista identify it and install properly.

ZXSpectrum · 31 Dec 2008 at 13:50

It is pretty good. But not anywhere near as good as dedicated card with onboard memory. You will need the drivers on a disk or memory key for it to work in Vista. Had major problems with it set as SAS with Onboard S-ATA set as AHCI tho...

fornowagain · 31 Dec 2008 at 14:01

Couldn't have been that good, they've just release the P6T Deluxe V2.0. No SAS, its the only change I can see.

Echo · 31 Dec 2008 at 20:26

They're handy either way as you can use them as normal SATA, giving a total of 8.

I need 10 including the opticals unfortunately, and the board doesn't like my Adaptec 1430SA after reboots

mmj_uk · 31 Dec 2008 at 21:55

fornowagain said:
Couldn't have been that good, they've just release the P6T Deluxe V2.0. No SAS, its the only change I can see.

It could just have been to cut manufacturing costs as 99% of their customers won't use SAS anyway.

fornowagain · 31 Dec 2008 at 22:42

Then why put on there in the first place. Nah don't buy that one, revisions rarely remove entire features. Maybe suppliers for chipsets, small changes, caps IC's, tweak a voltage or two. Not drop an entire controller, not to mention 2 sata ports. Now they have to segregate stock, new stock codes etc. Totally different product all the way down to the retailers. Knowing Asus, I'm surprised they didn't call it the 'Premium' and charge a bit more for it. Anyway, not like we'll even know... Coincidentally if you want SAS the 'also just released' P6T6 workstation has 2 of em, lol maybe that's where all the Marvell 88SE6320 controllers went.

EverybodyelsE · 1 Jan 2009 at 02:15

How dare they, lol. Although Asus don't seem to be implying that the version 2 is a replacement for the original P6T Deluxe as both are on their website as two seperate motherboards.

mmj_uk · 5 Jan 2009 at 18:18

I picked up one of these boards earlier and remembered this thread so I was interested in finding out which controller was better to use.

I've been benchmarking them with HDTune, Marvell SAS v Intel ICH10R in AHCI mode (both with a single WD640 SATA drive).

Average transfer rate is pretty much the same with both controllers (92-93MB/s), the only significant difference was in CPU usage...

ICH10R AHCI = 1.7%
Marvell SAS = 0.6%

Nothing massive in the grand scheme of things but the Marvell does use nearly 3 times less CPU cycles and every little bit helps.

Unfortunately I don't have an SAS HD to test with.

P.S. You need to use the drivers on the CD when installing Vista.