Gigabyte 7DXR, Drives using RAID controller causes choppiness in games.

[MrCoyote]

I have RAID disabled and want to use the drives like regular IDE drives on the Promise controller. For some reason, I can't enable DMA for these drives. The properties for the drives don't have enable DMA as an option (while on the Promise controller). But it has an option Int 13 unit and this option is checked and grayed out.

I'm getting extreme choppiness in games such as Diablo2. It is so choppy that it is unplayable. If I put the drives on the regular IDE controller, everything works fine and fast. Otherwise the drives seem to work okay on the RAID controller, but are causing slowdowns in games and probably working slower in general too. Is this a known issue with the Promise controller? Is there a fix?

My system specs:
WinME
Gigabyte 7DXR (F4 BIOS)
512MB DDR
Athlon 1.33

 

[chainbolt]

Hi Coyote, I fear we will not find an answer here, not many 7DXR owners are posting here

 

[Bingo13]

What Promise drivers are you using? (try the build 33 driver set from Asus) Do you have any PCI cards sharing the same IRQ with the Promsie controller? I have only tried the controller with a raid -0 setup but will see if it works any differently than yours with a single drive tonight. It could be a bios issue as the 20265r chipset has had single drive issues in the past.

 

[MrCoyote]

Okay, I downloaded and tried build 33. It didn't fix the problem. Nothing is sharing the same IRQ with the controller. If it's a BIOS issue, could it be updated/fixed? I hope so. I hate RMA'ing stuff, but if Gigabyte/Promise can't fix it, I'm going to return it and try the ABIT KG7.

 

[steve62]

Try posting your question here...

It's the Gigabyte forum at amdmb.com

 

[MrCoyote]

Okay, thanks but I already know about that forum.

I did find my problem. I'm not sure if this is what was causing the problem, but someone said I need to FDISK the drive on the Promise controller to set up the geometry correct. So I tried one last time, and FDISK and FORMAT the drive on the Promise controller. So far, it is working great!