Gigabyte X58A-UD3R and DPC Spikes.. Some Advice...

As I have written, I did a "Hail Mary" and swapped out the Asus board with Q9400 to the above GB board with an i7 950. All worked well and DPC didn't even register, barely on the chart.

Well, I decided in preparation for X1 I would fresh install Windows 7 x64 from scratch.
Did this, installed the drivers from the GB CD and so forth.
Fresh Sonar install as well.
Started getting crackles and pops...Hmmmm that's odd.

Checked DPC Latency and it was spiking into the yellow and not far off from the red!
Wow!
What have I done!!

Noticed some drivers under "Storage" in Device Mangler, Gigabyte something or other, 2 of them listed (they are gone now and I don't remember the exact names) that I don't remember being their from my upgrade which worked fine.

Ok disabled them and like magic DPC is back down to near zero. Actually about 15us with Absolute 81us and that's with a lot going on.

Unfortunately, the side effect was my DVD which is on an IDE channel (rest of my 4 drives are SATA 1 and on ports 0-3) disappeared.

A little Google time and I discovered the key is NOT to disable those Giga things but to update driver and select IDE for both of them.

Problem solved and DPC is again like 15us with zero spiking at all no matter what I do.

Just thought this might help out some other person battling this.

P.S. This is an excellent board, but the documentation while great in other areas, is totally hosed in explaining what each one of these controllers, Marvel, Gigabyte, Intel etc does and what the advantages/disadvantages or each are.
It's very confusing.

P.S.P.S. I'm sure Scott and Jim can chime in with some more specifics on this and what advantages if any (other than RAID) the other controllers have.

fsr76: Thank you for the clarification! You make a very interesting point about using on board RAID and potential for problems should the system board fail.
I never thought of that in all the years I have been building my own systems.
Good point!

I have HPET and all C States off and yes it did make a difference in latency!

Thanks again!

jcschild

fsr76


 While you can use the addition SATA controllers to create a RAID, it's better practice to use a RAID card.  The reason for this is if the motherboard should ever fail and you can't find an exact replacement, you can take your hard drives and your RAID card over to a new motherboard and the RAID will still be intact.  I can't say for sure what would happen to the RAID otherwise. 

 

completely disagree with this.. the only benefit to a raid card is better performance or very good raid 5/6.
 
the idea of loosing your work falls back to BACK IT UP. a single drive can die just like a raid.
shame on anyone not backing up their work raided or not.
 
with a proper back up proceedure this is not a concern.
FYI nearly every video editing system i sell has dual raid 0 using the onboard.
fail rate is no different than with single drives.
for audio raid is not required until hitting 50+ trascks 96k
 
 
without giving out to much info..
Raid is be choosen in the bios even without raid arrays.
this is why you got the error you did. a little more to this but it has to do with AHCI, NCQ and ACPI bios.
particularly with win 7 and new systems.
 
 

Yea there is no substitute for backing up and even more importantly checking to make sure the backups are actually working and a restore will function correctly. Nothing more frustrating than finding out the back ups you have been doing for months are corrupted for one reason or another.

The problem is, people believe RAID is their savior and that RAID in itself eliminates the need for proper backing up of mission critical systems. My day job is as an engineer for a company that manages, designs, installs and maintains mid-range and enterprise level computer rooms and systems.
Mostly IBM P and ZSeries enterprise level boxes and associtated SAN attached storage.
Disks are almost always either mirrored, RAIDED or both and I can tell you I have seen many cases where the entire RAID set was lost for one reason or another and the client had no working backup.
It turns to poop real fast.

As for DAW work, I agree 100 percent that RAID is unnecessary except as a back up for data.
 
Not sure if you meant me with the errors, but I didn't select RAID in the BIOS. Just the standard IDE/SATA stuff.
I'm not sure why the Gigabyte driver disk decided to install everything, but it did make a mess of things.
I'm not even sure why the DVD which is on the IDE port was effected by the Gigabyte/jMicron driver?

jcschild

yes i meant selecting raid in the bios even without using raid.
windows installs differently, very differently.
 
 
NEVER use the included drivers disk always update everything online from the manufacturers site not the mobo makers site.
the only thing you may have to use is the nic driver on the disk. just to got online
never install the fluff crap on the disks either...
 
already gave out too much info
 
and yeah i get a kick outta guys who think a raid 5 is a back up.
we sell these crazy raid arrays for video on very epensive raid cards think raid 6 with 2 global spares.
and depsite us saying back it up to a NAS you would be amazed how often we get ignored.
i guess they think we are just trying to add to the sale.
same with inline UPS's
 
then we get the call.. how you can miss that you have used your hot spare always shocks me.
 
Scott

You're singing my song Scott!!!!
I can hear the clients screaming, crying whatever, in my ears as I am typing this!

Something about a better mouse trap and a smarter mouse!

Yea, I made a huge mistake playing with the driver disk.
I never use any of those disks unless necessary.
I was smart enough not to install all the other crap but the various hdisk controller stuff confused me so I figured let it do it's thing.
Big mistake.
It did it's thing alright, to me!
And I didn't even get kissed

Nice chatting with you!  Have a Happy "Kentucky Fried Thanksgiving"!

no gigabyte does not make anything that needs drivers.
they assemble others hardware onto their boards...


intel for intel chipset driver
who ever for the LAn driver
ATI (err AMD website for ATI video drivers)
nVidia site for nvidia drivers
etc
etc
etc..

NEVER use the disk that comes with the mobo (or anything for the matter including interfaces)\
 always get the very latest drivers from the manufacturers.

Regarding the Raid discussion here:
I had a XFX mobo which I had 2 Raptors in Raid 0, and (of course) the mobo died on me. The Raptor raid is the Audio disk.

Since I take daily backups, I'm not worried about loosing the information on the disk, but I switched the mobo to a Gigabyte UD3R 2.0 1366.
The Audio raid was not lost - all information was intact.

Just as a clarification. I suppose this is because the XFX and Gigabyte mobo shares the Raid controller?

wormser

This is an excellent board, but the documentation while great in other areas, is totally hosed in explaining what each one of these controllers, Marvel, Gigabyte, Intel etc does and what the advantages/disadvantages or each are.
It's very confusing.

I have the GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard and I was confused too.  I ended up using the Gigabyte RAID in a RAID 0 configuration with a pair of 74GB Raptor drives for storing multisamples.  These multisamples are all backed up elsewhere, so potential drive failure is not a big worry.