Damn I ordered the 9650se the other day as well for my P5K, I wonder if I should just return the card when it arrives or try it myself as well. Grrrr, was really looking forward to using this card too. I guess I should have just stuck with my hpt2320 but I wanted to go with something with a little better raid5 performance.


Quote Originally Posted by Mr Footlong View Post
Yey, well that was a waste of time........... Got the card today and updated to the latest firmware. Installed in the black pci-e slot. Plugged all 4 drives into it, fired up and went into the bios to set the intel controller back to IDE with just the dvd plugged in 1. saved changes and rebooted. Got a blank screen after the bios loaded, pressed reset button and got unsupported 3ware card, consult your pc bios people basically. Yey. pulled all power to the machine and then booted from cold. got in to the 3ware bios and created a 3 drive array, missing out the drive the intel controller flagged, just in case, as it didn't need a reboot after this it loaded the xp setup. Driver installed and I had my partitions to choose. Went to format it and either using quick or normal format I got cannot format errors, the disk may be damaged.

So, I had a board that overclocked brilliantly but crapped out left, right and centre with quad RAID, threw £230 at it and got a board that can't run a common raid controller properly and even when using official drivers cannot run XP setup. I tested this card at work in an altos server that I used to update the firmware, it had ZERO problems and could format partitions just fine.

The overclocking abilities of this board are excellent, but I really, really, really don't like it at all now.