some help needed

[mcalladine]

ok guys my system -
msi-p55-gd65
i7-860 (stock)
geil 2133 ram 4gb (new Kingston hyper x genesis 8gb)
gtx 580

just purchased 8gb of ram (that's working fine at least)
and a ssd crucial M4 120gb
but knowing that my mb does not support sata 3 i decided getting a sata 3 pcie controller card.
so i put the controller card in and it was showing up 2.5gbps after much confusion i realized that i put it in a X1 slot (doh!) so then i put it in the x4 pcie slot and yet it still runs at 2.5gbps !?
now getting really confused i decided to put it in the second x16 lane and then it worked at 5gbps but it brought my gtx580 down to x8 that is unacceptable.
also trying to set it to AHCI mode there is 2 options on my bios don't quite know which one to use ? as now i don't have the controller card in just plugged into sata 2 ports because i cant get it to work at 5gbs without it taking half my gfx card
will updating the bios have anything to do with the x4 lane or the AHCI function ? as i am only running bios 1.2

anyone to help clear this confusion would be greatly appreciated

martin

 

[CinderzFTW]

First of all, Sata 3 drives are backwards compatible with Sata 2 xD

For the controller card, sounds as though the 4 lanes running in your second pci-e lane is bottlenecking the performance. Ideally, you want a x8 or x16 slot to run it on as they have more bandwidth to transfer data on than the lonely x4 slot.

There is the problem I think.

You could try the latest drivers, rather than the out of the box drivers.

You could also try updating the bios to the latest version, but I doubt that would have any effect on the performance of the pci-e lanes and how much bandwidth they can transfer at any one time.