Gigabyte 790GP-DS4H replacement with Jetway HA07 Ultra
OK guys, this is just a brief update for those that are interested. As many of us had tons of problems with the Gigabyte 790GP-DS4H, I decided to part ways with it. I've had an Asus M3A78-T running at our ski house, and it has been awesome, but I wanted to try the Jetway.
I bought it from newegg, and have had super luck with it so far. A couple of notes on what I did, cuz it worked remarkably well (I'd rather be lucky than smart!)
The boards both use identical components (except the Jetway lacks a 1394 controller), so moving the existing disks over actually didn't even trigger any plug and play events (which is somewhat remarkable, as it usually re-reads the ESCD and does its thing over and over again)
I built up a test system using a couple of seagate 80GB SATA 1 disks in RAID 1. I used my lame-oh 9950, and a set of OCZ 2x1GB 1066 memory. Also used a Lite-on SATA optical DVD.
There were absolutely ZERO problems with building up the test system. I wanted to see if
1) RAID would work properly
2) If ACC actually did anything
3) If Hybrid Crossfire worked
4) If it had any cold booting or boot cycle problems
5) How the BIOS settings actually affected the system
Amazingly, EVERYTHING worked spot on. At first, I thought it had a disagreement with a microsoft 6000 laser mouse, but it turned out that the receiver for the mouse died. I've also had lots of problems with Asus EAH3450s when trying to get them to work with Hybrid Crossfire in every board I had, and the Jetway was no different (the Asus boards cause stalled POST sometimes with SurroundView enabled). But I also had an MSI 3450 that I installed and it works perfectly.
So basically, with the MSI board installed, and a new logitech mouse, everything is perfect. It doesn't have ANY of the delays or hangs that the Gigabyte had. No cold booting problems, even with ACC on.
As far as the BIOS goes, it has all the goodies. Even more than the Asus and Gigabyte in certain sections, although I have no idea what half those things do. ACC definitely does something with this board. My 4 cores behave much differently with different ACC settings (as measured with multi core Prime95). Also, with the Jetway, ACC does not stall a cold boot, it just fires right up.
I've been able to get the 9950 to 3.3Ghz @ 1.45V. But I know this CPU pretty well, and it has no balls to go beyond that, even with much higher voltage.
The BIOS has some interesting limitations (or not depending on how you look at it). I stupidly bought a set of the OCZ Fatality DDR2 1066 2x2GB sticks that clock out at 7-7-7-20 (newegg $20, couldn't resist). The Jetway board will NOT run these because the slowest the memory timings go is 6-6-6-18. I swapped the OCZ 2x2GB DDR2 1066 Platinums I had in the Asus (5-5-5-15) and it booted right up.
So after all the testing, I simply moved my RAID 1 set (2x500GB Seagate 7200.10) from the Gigabyte to the Jetway, and it just came up, probably 30% faster than the Gigabyte, with all identical parts.
I then installed some PCI Pinnacle parts, a video capture board, and an HDTV tuner (so I can continue my addiction to CNBC). It all just worked. No fuss, no muss.
All in all, I am very very pleased with the Jetway board. The only real shortcomings I see are that the DRAM timings in BIOS are too aggressive for slow memory (which is probably not a shortcoming), and they give you a PCI Express paddle card, but don't tell you what to do with it anywhere.
When I get a PII 940, I'm gonna move the hero 9850 (3.6Ghz on ripping.org) into the Jetway and floor it. Can't wait.
