• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Where Are The Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 Motherboards?

Page 54 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Mr rt182,

You may not be off topic with this one as there are many that had this kind of problems especially with SATA drives. We need more info though. What kind of OS are you using ? Are you using a SATA HD ? If so, do you have ACHI enabled ? Is this HD part of a RAID array ? Are you using nVidia?s or Gigabyte?s controller ?
 
I am going to try to raid some hard drives I got. I want to raid0 two 500 gig sata2 for data and raid1 two 320 gig sata2 drives for my Vista64 Ultimate OS with duelboot winxp86. Is it better to use Gigabytes raid or Nvidia's raid? Also anything special I have to do with this MOBO to make it raid right? Thanks in advance...
 
Good Evening Mr. DLBetz.

The NVidia ports will give you better function and reliability for RAID arrays. However, I am constrained to inquire why you would risk a catastrophic loss of all your data by utilizing a RAID 0 (striping) array for this purpose? If ANYTHING goes wrong with the integrity of that RAID 0 array, you can pretty well kiss any data on those drives goodbye.

Using a RAID 0 array to install your operating system(s) may give you a small (relatively speaking) boost in performance over a single drive or a RAID 1 (mirror) array. However, especially in Vista Business or Ultimate version, particularly the 64 bit versions, the built-in backup utility is really quite good. Therefore, unless you need redundancy for your system drives or need those few extra bits of drive performance that might be possible from a RAID 0 array, then a single Raptor 150 (16 MG cache) drive for the OS is quite adequate.

But since you indicated that you want to dual boot that machine, then you may need a larger physical drive for installation of your operating systems, especially if you install a lot of programs. If you do use a larger (non-Raptor) drive for the OS install, you will benefit from selecting a drive that has perpendicular recording (the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives are outstanding!).

The Gigabyte SATA ports should be used for external SATA drive connections and for DVD-RW drives, etc. I hope that helps a bit. Best regards. TheBeagle 😀 :beer:

 
Thankyou Mr beagle, I have been talking to my friend and all said I should put my 500gig sata2 hard drive into mirror mode to saveall my data on so if one drive fails the other will still work. I thought they said the raid0 was the (mirror) and to put my seagate 7200.11 320gig sata2 hard drives into raid1 for performance. They said in raid were just as good as a raptor. Andit was way cheaper to get two 320gig seagates to a raptor near that size. So I figured if I put it in raid with vista ultimate64and xp86 duel boot xp just for some apps and drivere that are not up to date with vista. Also when you said to use the Nvidia sata ports over Gigabytes why? And are the yellow ports nvidia and purple ports Gigabyte? If so should I plug all 4 of my hard drives into the yelow ports and my two dvd sata drives into the purple ones? Thanks, I always like leaning new stuff. I have never used raid before. Also my apps are abobe professional 8, adobe cs3 pro, adobe lightroom & photoshop cs3. And minor other apps nothing major.
 
Mr. Beagle I see that the E6850 has dropped below $300 and I am wondering if it is worth it to replace my current E6600. The 6600 has been stable running @ 3.0GHz. Can I expect the 6850 to OC as reliably at a 25% OC? Or, will the Penryn run on this board and if so am I better off waiting?
 
Mfarb,

I'm wondering the same?

Tom's Hardware shows an improvement in 3DMark06 CPU from 2100 to 2600 marks.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/...7&model2=872&chart=419

All things being relative, that's nearly a 25% increase. I think Q1 '08 will be interesting when all the procs start rolling and we find out if this Board does Penryn.

Beagle, did you try the 6850 on the 680i board or are you strictly on the P35 now? Hope ur doin' well.

Tanks,
 
the drive that has gone missing is actualy a IDE drive i have raid on my main HD and i have 2 other spare drives are IDE. one of the IDE has dissapperd. im using nvidia controller and im using 64bit Vista Ultimate..
 
Originally posted by: dlbetz
Thankyou Mr beagle, I have been talking to my friend and all said I should put my 500gig sata2 hard drive into mirror mode to saveall my data on so if one drive fails the other will still work. I thought they said the raid0 was the (mirror) and to put my seagate 7200.11 320gig sata2 hard drives into raid1 for performance. They said in raid were just as good as a raptor. Andit was way cheaper to get two 320gig seagates to a raptor near that size. So I figured if I put it in raid with vista ultimate64and xp86 duel boot xp just for some apps and drivere that are not up to date with vista. Also when you said to use the Nvidia sata ports over Gigabytes why? And are the yellow ports nvidia and purple ports Gigabyte? If so should I plug all 4 of my hard drives into the yelow ports and my two dvd sata drives into the purple ones? Thanks, I always like leaning new stuff. I have never used raid before. Also my apps are abobe professional 8, adobe cs3 pro, adobe lightroom & photoshop cs3. And minor other apps nothing major.
Click to expand...

Mr dlbetz,

The yellow ports are indeed for nVidia?s controller. As for the preference over Gigabyte?s controller there are quite a few reasons for that. nVidia?s controller is embedded in the chipset (southbridge) and because of this it is a little bit faster than Gigabyte?s solution. It is also a more sophisticated controller as it supports raid 5 and 10.

With Gigabyte?s controller all you get is raid 0,1 and JBOD. The reason for this is that the 4 purple ports do not belong to the same controller. There are actually 2 Gigabyte raid controllers with 2 ports each which makes them unsuitable for raid 10 or 5 as you need more than 2 drives for these kind of raid arrays. This is why it is better to utilize these ports for external SATA drives or optical drives than wasting the ?good? ports from nVidia?s controller. You should also take into account that software support for nVidia?s controller is way better and this is something to consider especially when it comes to data integrity.

More to this, 4 of nVidia?s ports are angled and this makes it easier when using long expansion cards as the cables won?t interfere with them. The other 2 ports are located at the height of the 2nd PCI next to the USB ports which puts them out of the way also. If you are gonna use a 2nd 2-slot VGA it will become too difficult to access the purple ports without uninstalling the 2nd VGA first.

If I were you I would plug all 6 devices to the yellow ports. Doing so will give you the advantage of shutting down both Gigabyte?s raid controllers and thus free some resources. In the future if you want to add any more HDs you can always enable Gigabyte?s controller(s) and move your optical drives there without any problem.
 
blazer7, thanks for the comments I will use the nvidia ports.. I dont have the mobo infront of me but i think there is only 4 yellow ports. how would i plug all 6 into that? Thanks..
 
Mr dlbetz,

There are definitely 6 yellow sata ports. 4 angled at the edge of the board and another 2 just below them, next to the yellow USB headers.
 
Originally posted by: mfarbman
Mr. Beagle I see that the E6850 has dropped below $300 and I am wondering if it is worth it to replace my current E6600. The 6600 has been stable running @ 3.0GHz. Can I expect the 6850 to OC as reliably at a 25% OC? Or, will the Penryn run on this board and if so am I better off waiting?
Click to expand...

Originally posted by: eklock2000
Mfarb,

I'm wondering the same?

Tom's Hardware shows an improvement in 3DMark06 CPU from 2100 to 2600 marks.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/...7&model2=872&chart=419

All things being relative, that's nearly a 25% increase. I think Q1 '08 will be interesting when all the procs start rolling and we find out if this Board does Penryn.

Beagle, did you try the 6850 on the 680i board or are you strictly on the P35 now? Hope ur doin' well.

Tanks,
Click to expand...

Mr mfarbman, eklock,

I recently replaced my E6600 with an E6850 and I can say that this cpu rocks. The E6850 is pretty fast and although I?m not into ocing I did play with it a little and it shows great potential. It is also running cooler than my E6600 did.

TheBeagle has posted at some time that he was running his E6850 @3.6 (400x9) @1.425V. That?s a 20% increase which is not bad at all. There is another post by TheBeagle on page 55. There he mentions that he was running his E6850 @3.45 at stock voltage. I believe that 3.75 can be easily achieved with any water-cooling kit out there.

As for penryn support, nVidia claims that all the 680 based boards will need is a BIOS upgrade. ASUS already claims penryn support for all 3 680 boards they have. With a little luck our board will also get support for penryn. This is of course provided that Gigabyte will get their act together.

It is rumoured that this year we are only gonna see one penryn cpu and this will probably be a quad core Yorkfield. This is expected to be an extreme edition / extreme expensive cpu. It seems that we will probably have to wait until Q1 next year to get our hands on mainstream penryns.

So if you can?t wait for another 6 months and you don?t care much about quad cores the E6850 is the way to go.
 
Hey guys i would some advice about oveclocking my QX6700 and mayb my Ram. im using corsair dominator pc8500C5D.. the thing im worried about are voltages is there anywhere that explains what i should do with those??

also in my bios it says next to DDR2 1.8V fail ...... is that suppose to be like that
 
Mr rt182,

You should definitely use the Dominator mem cooler if you are gonna oc your mem. When mem voltage is set to normal this is equivalent to 1.8V. If you increase your mem voltage then the DDR2 1.8V fail message appears.

You are probably running your mem at spec which is +0.400 for 2.2V. This is what causes the DDR2 1.8V fail message.
 
Originally posted by: TheBeagle
Good Morning Mr. Heybeunde.

It sounds like you might have missed a step or two installing the OS. If you are installing Vista, I would definitely suggest Vista 64, as it will give you full use of your memory and is MUCH more stable than the 32 bit version. In any event, as part of the initial install from the DVD at bootup, you should eventually go into an installation screen where the drives in you system are displayed. If you CANNOT see your RAID array, then you have a machine level error in the array build.

In such a case, it will be necessary to reboot and go into the RAID setup (Ctrl-I or F10), and reset the array. In order to ensure that you get a proper array, you should first clear the RAID drives from their RAID designation. By that I mean, you need to remove them from the array so that they are no longer tagged on their boot sector as RAID drives. After you have removed them from RAID designation, reboot the machine.

After reboot, go back into the RAID Setup, select each drive, add it to the array, give the array a name, and then exit the RAID Setup. I would force a reboot at this time, and allow the system to start up fresh. Once you get through the POST and boot off the DVD into Vista, you should be able to see your RAID array as a single drive. If not, then you have not properly set the CMOS settings to accommodate a RAID array.

If you can see your drives in Vista, then you know that they are properly functioning in an array, since nVidia 680i drivers are native in Vista. I would then designate a primary partition on the array and format the array in Vista. After that you should be good to go for installing the OS. Hope that's of some help to you. TheBeagle 😀 :beer:
Click to expand...


Thank you Mr. Beagle. I set up an IDE drive, installed Vista 64, then set up my RAID (2 Raptors). Installed Vista 64 and updated drivers to the max!!

I now have a new puzzle: When I boot up with the IDE drive and the Vista disk in, Windows gives me a choice of two installs of Vista to use (IDE or RAID). I can choose the RAID installation and everything seems to run smoothly (and fast!). If I remove the Vista disk, I get a drive read error, and the only option is to Ctl+Alt+Del for the reboot. I get the same whether I have the IDE drive connected or not. If I disconnect the IDE drive and leave the Vista disk in, the system goes into Vista install, and I cannot install on the RAID drive! Same symptoms as before, the install program sees the array but will not install on it...

Help! It seems similar to having a missing or bad MBR, but I wanted to through this out here before I went down that road.
 
Blazer7, Thanks!!! I will look at my mobo when i get home. Also are my friends right by telling me to (mirror) my two 500gigs for data and raid 0 my two seagate 320gigs for performance? Or will I not see a diference in performance at all. They said by putting them in raid I should get raptor performance. Thanks again..
 

Mr dlbetz,

I have 2 seagate 7200.10 320GB disks in raid 0 on one of Gigabyte's controller (have 6x74GB raptors on nVidia's controller in 3 raid 0 arrays) and I can say that there is indeed a significant boost in performance. So far I'm extremely pleased from both nVidia's and Gigabyte's controllers as they gave me absolutely no problem. Everything is perfect.

It is certainly good to have a large raid 1 array as you can have your OS, programs and data there and sleep peacefully at nights. A raid 0 is not really a raid as it does not sport redundancy. It is great for performance but it is not secure. If you use raid 0s like I do you?d better have a backup of your data stored somewhere else. You never know when (or if) you may need it but it is good to be prepared.

PS
Have in mind that I'm on XP. I have no idea how the raid drivers perform under Vista.
 
blazer7, Thanks again.. I want my two 500gig hd's to hold just my data i dont want to lose like pics,videos. I want my two 320 gig hd's to run my apps and raid them for performance. That way if my os or any apps fail I can just reload and still have evrything important like pics in my 500gig. Am I thinking right? two seagate 320 gig hd's in raid0 perform almost the same as one raptor? or am I wrong?
 
Mr dlbetz,

You got that right in both aspects, security and performance. I can also say that these 2 drives will perform similarly to a raptor drive with the exception of seek times. If my memory serves me, a single raptor will beat this raid config in both Avg and sequential seek times. This is no real loss though as the improvement over a single drive is more than noticeable. Have in mind that the gain of a raid 0 array compared to a single drive is subject to a number of factors like the quality of the raid controller, driver performance, hard disks etc.

From what I've seen I believe that Gigabyte did a great job with the GA-N680SLI-DQ6 in terms of raid performance. But this is only compared to other 680 based boards. My previous board (Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6) had an intel raid controller that was much faster. It always comes down to controllers, drivers and disks. With my previous board the seagates were much closer to the performance of raptor drives than what they are now but since you already have the disks you should just go ahead and give it a try. If it works for you everything is fine, if not just kill the raid and set up your disks any way you like it.

Trial and failure... Trial and success
 
@Blazer7...

Thanks for the refresh on the E6850 stuff that Beagle posted. I don't know how you find who posted what on what pages, there are so many on this thread now?

I will likely hold off for six months until the Penryns start flooding the market. I for one really hope Gigabyte comes through on not only the BIOS update for Penryn's, but also the Quad-Core optimizations. We should know more soon.

Any thoughts on the newer perpendicular recording drives (7,200rpm) and their performance vs. Raptors/Raid?

Thanks again,

EK2K...Out!
 
Good Evening Everyone.

WOW! So many questions and suggestions. It's rather challenging. First to the CPU questions. Yes, the E6850 is a solid overclocker. I regularly run it all day, most every day, at 400 x 9 = 3.6 GHz @ 1.400V. The memory is unlinked and set to 1066 @ +.4.25V. It seems that the nVidia chipset needs a bit more voltage to the proc to keep it stable than a comparable P35 board. I don't know why, that's just the way it seems to go. I'm using a Zalman 9700 to cool the proc, and it doesn't seem to work very hard at all to keep the proc temps under control.

As for the RAID questions. As I recently posted, the nVidia (yellow) SATA ports are the desired ports for all RAID endeavors. Mr. Blazer was quite correct in his further comments on this issue. Some of the questions seem to indicate a slight misunderstanding of my earlier RAID comments. In my judgment, it is NEVER a good idea to utilize a RAID 0 array (striping) for any kind of data storage. If the array craps out, there goes you data. All data storage that is being held on a RAID array should be in some kind of redundant arrangement (RAID 1, 5, 10, etc)

Operating systems can and do operate quite well on modern single SATA drives, but can also be installed on a RAID array. If you have a backup (as suggested by Mr. Blazer), it is OK to put the OSs on a RAID 0 to gain the last bit of performance. However, I have never been a fan of RAID 0 arrays, so I can't, in good conscience, recommend that arrangement. Of course, others will have a different point of view on that issue, and that's what makes life interesting.

I haven't yet had an opportunity to work with the "new" nVidia drivers for the N680i chipset, other than to have installed them. However, I have had to use the Vista system restore feature twice in the past few days as a result of allowing the latest M$ "updates" for Vista 64 to be download and installed on my PC. The net result of those downloads was a total loss of network function in my PC which could not be fixed short of using the restore function. I am not yet positive that it is an inherent conflict between the nVidia drivers and the M$ updates, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of this issue this coming holiday weekend. I'll keep you posted on those developments. Have a nice evening. TheBeagle 🙂 :beer:
 
Mr rt182,

If you have increased your mem voltage then this is normal. I'm running my GSkills @2.275V (+0.475) and the message is there since day 1.
 
Mr eklock,

Currently Seagate?s 7200.10 1st generation perpendicular tech disks do not offer any real advantage compared to other similar drives from WD or Hitachi let alone Raptors. I?ve had a look at Seagate?s datasheet for their 2nd generation drives (7200.11) and they claim a sustained data transfer of 105MBs. WD claims 84 for their Raptors. Somehow I don?t believe that Seagate?s numbers are true. From what I?ve heard the 7200.11 disks will get closer to Raptor performance but won?t much it. Raptors will certainly retain their lead especially when it comes to seek times.

PS
It?s been almost 2 months (07/05/2007) since Gigabyte last updated their cpu support list for our board. I can?t help but wonder if we are ever gonna get official support for the new quads.

PSS
I was looking for an E6850 at about the same time that Mr Beagle got his. Mr Beagle?s post on page 55 was also addressed to me so it was quite hard not to remember that one. (Thanks Beagle)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top