Poor performance with Gigabyte GA-8IHXP

[FishToRat]

I recently put together a new system with the following specs: Pentium IV 2.26ghz proc, 2x256mb PC1066 Kingston ram, Gigabyte GA-8IHXP mainboard, 2x Western Digital WD800JB hard drives, PNY GeForce 4 Ti4400, 400 watt antec power supply.

I did a clean format and fdisk of each hard drive and plugged both into the onboard raid controller. Then I set up my RAID 0 array using the "fast array" utility, provided by the bios. Then I installed windows 2000 and provided the appropriate Promise MBFastTrak133 Lite drivers during install. However, I found performance to be extremely poor. So poor that the install of w2k took at least 2 hours and boot times are in the 8-10 min range.

Hard drive performance is seriously lacking, I feel like im trying to edit video or play never winter nights on a Pentium 200.

The RAID array is most likely the culprit because I tried installing win2k with just a single drive connected to the primary ide controller and everything ran as would be expected. My raid setup on the otherhand is really screwed up.

Am I doing something wrong? Or mabye I have a lemon board...

 

[babah]

hey buddy u got the same like mine, but my computer ran like a dream wow!!
I dont know how to help you but someone will do, so hang on here aitee.

ciaw

 

[Bingo13]

Did you setup the Promise chipset as Raid or IDE in the bios? It defaults to IDE.

 

[cobrasvt]

You need to install the Intel INF drivers. Without them, your PCI is running like a turtle with hemroids,

As far as it taking 2 hours to install, this does seem strange. XP installed in like 20 minutes on my setup, even though I'm not using RAID...

Hmmm...

 

[cobrasvt]

Never mind what I just said, I just noticed that it was geeking during the install. Like Bingo said, make sure you have RAID enabled in the Promise bios, as well as in the main bios. You will notice that when the board is booting, the screen after the initial post says MBUltra133. If it is saying that, then its running in ATA mode. If its saying Promise*, then its running in RAID mode (don't know exactly what it says when running in RAID mode).

 

[FishToRat]

Yes, I did have the raid option selected in the bios. It seems that I have fixed the problem though. I did a format of the raid array and installed windows xp and loaded the promise raid xp drivers during install. Everything seems to be running as fast as it should now that I have win xp, but for some reason when I installed w2k with the win2k raid drivers, it ran like crap. Don't know why that would be the case, but now it works and is extremely fast, especially compared to my old pentium 3 600, so I am happy... suppose I wasn't doing something correctly when I installed windows 2000.