ASUS P5K Deluxe - Intel P35 Bearlake + E6600 B1 / Q6600 B3

[highoctane]

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.

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.

[Mr Footlong]

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.

I wouldn't worry just yet as it turns out this this may be a lesson in 'newest isn't always best'. As a matter of course I updated the firmware on the card to the 9.4.1.1 set before even putting it in to the P5K as I had never had a firmware or compat issue with any other 3ware card. I spent the best part of yesterday fitting the 680i in to my case and fired it all up with the 3ware in there and first boot was OK, but after that the machine would either halt on the mediashield bios loading, or get part way through the 3ware bios and die, or come up with cannot recognise card, contaxct bios vendor etc etc. I have just downgraded to the 9.4.0.1 firmware and the machine 'appears' to be behaving just fine. I am currently slipstreaming the drivers onto the xp cd.

Later on I will slap enoguh stuff in to the p5k mobo and fire it up with the 3ware on and see if it too starts to behave. Fingers crossed tbh as I do prefer the Intel boards.