Quote Originally Posted by petercintn View Post
Got mine Thursday and thought I'd got one of the bad ones. Just had to get rid of the nvidia raid on the HD's. Not to bad of a prob.

Been playing around with the board, everything works great, going to see which size stripe is best now. But no problems with board, loaded with 204 bios, made in TW. Lost my water pump, but I have a Q6600 G0 with the stock cooler running @ 356x9 with 1.25vid. This board seems great so far.
I have the same board.
Made in Taiwan, shipped with 0204 BIOS.
And unfortunately, my P5K-Premium has that annoying abnormal SATA issue.
I'm using the 5000AAKS WD drive 500GB in AHCI mode and Vista 64bit.
The installation process took 1.5hours which was rediculous. Especially in the expanding file in stage 2.
I thought flashing to 0302 beta BIOS will somehow fix this damn problem but it's not. I get this intermittent system freezes due to the infamous mobo's SATA controller. You can identify the HDD led is on full blue means is on max loading when the system is unresponsive. You have to wait like 2-3 mins for the HDD to finish loading whatever it's loading..

Just exactly like everyone describes on every other forum, Asus support forum...not even my P5K-Deluxe does this....

I'm going to RMA this board in and get a store credit and use it towards the upcomming X38 mobo.

While the the system is running fine, the HDD is smooth and fast. HD tune reports very fast read/write/burst rate speed for one 5000AAKS HD under AHCI configuration, Avg 68mb/s and 112mb burst rate. But as soon as the intermittent abnormal HDD activity kicks in, I feel like I'm back in the P2/P3 days...OMFG....

I hate Asus's so called - 18th anniversary BLACK PEARL special edition Marketing bullsxxt crap....

Yes, I've tried everything I can to try to solve this but apparently, I think it's a hardware related issue like everyone else.

This is my 7th system I build/OC this year so I'm not a noob and I know what I'm doing...

Anyways...just to let eveyrone know that this mobo particularily, P5K-Premium is very buggy in terms of its SATA controller, other than that I belive it's a step above P5K-Dlx in its OC-ability. But it's useless to point out what good is left when the basic PC functionality fails to perform....