P5B Deluxe/P965-DS3 with SATA confusion?

[opiuman]

I was planning to get this particular motherboard for a new computer I was planning to buy soon but after crawling the forums for awhile there seems to be problems or issues with this board and the configurations. I plan to have 2 SATA HDDs and 1 CD/DVD SATA burner in the configuration. I am not interested in any IDE support or RAID so what would the BIOS config be and which ports should I plug them into on the motherboard? I feel somewhat paranoid and apprehensive about this since I'm picking this over the DS3 from Gigabyte since that seems to have even more issues. Also I don't care about the AHCI feature as well and do not want to use it.

I am also debating on getting a DS3 but hypothetically if I had the same configuration(2 SATA HDD and 1 SATA burner) how would I set up the DS3? People say not to install the drivers from the CD, grab the latest BIOS and drivers from the Gigabyte website as well as grab the latest Intel chipset drivers. If I did these 3 steps would I be in the clear?

EDIT: I plan to get this, a E6420, MSI 8800 GTS 320 MB, Corsair 2x1GB PC-6400 at 5-5-5-12 at 1.9v and a Rosewill 550W PSU. Any recommendations on this would be helpful too.

 

[vailr]

Since you don't plan to use raid, there's no reason to pay the extra ~$100 for a board with the Intel ICH8R Raid chipset, of which the Asus P5B Deluxe is one example.
On the Gigabyte DS3 (Intel ICH8 non-Raid), just utilize the orange Intel ports, and you'll not run into any problems. Just install while booted from a WinXP SP2 install CD.
After Windows has been installed, then install the latest Intel Inf driver 8.4.0.1010 beta downloaded from: http://www.station-drivers.com/page/intel%20chipset.htm
Note: The DS3 does provide raid via the JMicron controller, if you were to change your mind on wanting Raid. It's not quite as speedy as Intel Matrix Raid, but still pretty fast.
And, there are less expensive ICH8R boards, such as the DFI board with the 965/ICH8R chipsets. It's only about $40 more than the DS3.

 

[opiuman]

Ah ok thanks for the specific answer to that. It appears that there are a total of 4 orange ones right? I'm just a little concerned with the issues that I've been seeing on the forums about motherboards and being picky on SATA ports and selection. However, thanks for the help!

Furthermore I plan on using Corsair XMS2 (1GBx2) at PC-6400 at 5-5-5-12 at 1.9v. It is recommended that I boot using one stick first, change the voltage as needed then boot with the second stick right? I've also heard issues with 965 boards being really picky with the RAM.

 

[vailr]

Memory causing a non-boot condition are pretty much gone on the various DS3 versions (1.0, 1.3, 2.0, 3.3) with F7 and later bios versions.
Buying today, you'll probably get the F10 bios pre-installed.

 

[opiuman]

Thanks vailr for the good insight. My cheap ECS board fried and I'm looking to overhaul everything and it has really helped!!!

 

[Eirgorn]

Just wanted to say thanks to the OP and responders as I had some similiar questions!

 

[gramboh]

If I could thread hijack for a moment here, I'm running an Asus P5B-Deluxe with 2 SATA HDD's and one SATA DVDRW all on Intel channels (JMicron disabled). I have the Intel controller set to AHCI in BIOS but I cannot seem to tell if NCQ is on or not. I know the drives are in SATA2 mode because HDTach burst speed is over 200MB/s.

Thanks

 

[opiuman]

If I remember correctly AHCI On also turns on NCQ as one of its features.

 

[gramboh]

Originally posted by: opiuman
If I remember correctly AHCI On also turns on NCQ as one of its features.

Thanks, I've heard this but I thought you could confirm it in Windows on drive/controller properties but nothing is there in device manager. Oh well, it feels fast to me.