ASUS Striker II Extreme

[slim142]

If you see the difference from your seagate raid to your new raid 0 128kb stripe intel drives, I think the speed upgrade should definitely make you more than happy.

Even more when you know you can easily gain more than 300mbs in read speed once you make the move ti i7.

I say great purchase, enjoy those amazing 0.1 seconds while loading call of duty hahaha

Btw, I need to know how fast your PC boots now, what better than having an SIIE owner tell me how this board boots with SSDs in RAID.

[Trigger5521]

Here something interesting. The first run I did with one drive stand alone it was still under the raid controller in the BIOS I just set it to 1 drive spanning. Anyways I decided to check and see if they need a BIOS update, Intel gives you a bootable CD iso to do the updates. After booting it could not find the drive...reading through the instructions it says you can't do it if the drive is under RAID. So I removed both drives from the raid controller in the bios and re-booted with the cd. BINGO both drives detected and new FW applied. Fired up Vista and setup the drive as standalone. New benchmark for single drives is much better. Not certian is this is because of the FW or being off Nvidia raid controller. More testing needed.

Slim: I'll let you know how win7 boots in a few days, going to play around with them a bit first.

Before


After

[Sangrak]

Here something interesting. The first run I did with one drive stand alone it was still under the raid controller in the BIOS I just set it to 1 drive spanning. Anyways I decided to check and see if they need a BIOS update, Intel gives you a bootable CD iso to do the updates. After booting it could not find the drive...reading through the instructions it says you can't do it if the drive is under RAID. So I removed both drives from the raid controller in the bios and re-booted with the cd. BINGO both drives detected and new FW applied. Fired up Vista and setup the drive as standalone. New benchmark for single drives is much better. Not certian is this is because of the FW or being off Nvidia raid controller. More testing needed.

Slim: I'll let you know how win7 boots in a few days, going to play around with them a bit first.

Before


After

Nice performance!

So are you saying that there's no way to use TRIM with the 790i?

[Trigger5521]

Well upto a few days ago TRIM was not supported if you RAID your drives period. Intel just released TRIM support for RAID (excludes RAID5) for their own chipsets. No word on Nvidia doing this in the future, I wouldn't hold my breath as they are out of the chipset business.

I'm going to try to manually TRIM the drives using the Intel SSD tool box by removing the drives from the raid controller in the BIOS, I actually tired it last night(the tool said raid not supported) but I think I may have had to reboot, ran out of time. Gotta test again. Either the tool will not allow you to do anything if you have anything under raid or I just needed to initialize the drive first. Intel says they are planning to upgrade the toolbox to support RAID.

The RAID performance numbers are hard to ignore(go back a page Sangrak to see RAID #'s) plus you get a reasonable amount of space to install OS and apps. 150GB formatted.

[Trigger5521]

Well Slim I've installed Win7 64bit on the SSD's in RAID 0 128K stripe. Applied most of these Win7 tweaks. Created a 1GB RAM drive for IE's cache.

All I can say is Wowsors, she is quick. Browsing is very fast, Adobe photoshop elements 7 loads up so quick(superfetch/prefetch is disabled). Boot up/shut down is very fast even after I've added the time to load the RAM drive image. I'm and SSD convert for sure. I benched the SSD's right after Win7 install and after I installed a whole wack load of apps. Performance is actually slightly better after apps. I'm serioulsy considering 2 more SSD's to use as a Games drive. OS and Apps on one RAID 0 160GB, Games on another 120GB RAID 0 and use my 2 500GB conventional drives in RAID 0 to hold movies and music.

Right after Win7 installed no apps.


After apps and tweaks

[slim142]

Wow thats interesting. TRIM in action is better than when its OS fresh lol.

I cant wait to move to SSDs, this numbers are just SWEET on the S2E.

[Trigger5521]

Wow thats interesting. TRIM in action is better than when its OS fresh lol.

I cant wait to move to SSDs, this numbers are just SWEET on the S2E.

Still no TRIM when using RAID and Nvidia chipset...but performance is decent right now. This has the potential to change which is why I have been benching as I go. I'll keep an eye on how the performace does over time. All my shots are neatly saved in this thread, for reference.

Also plan to add 2 GTX 470's SLI, one of my 8800GT's died a few months back...puts a serious hurt on gaming at 2560x1600 let me tell ya. I figure SSD & new GPU's should give me decent life extension out my rig.

[slim142]

Dam 2 470s! thats gonna be sick. That striker its been stressed to the full potential

[Trigger5521]

Dam 2 470s! thats gonna be sick. That striker its been stressed to the full potential

She can handle it I'm sure.

[Sangrak]

I'm definitely upgrading to an SSD, but I'm not setting up a RAID. I'm still wondering if manual TRIM is an option, because I've heard the degradation in performance is pretty severe if TRIM isn't used on the drive after awhile. I've also heard that Win 7's native SATA driver is faster than nvidia's driver when it comes to SSD's and TRIM is fully supported in the driver...

I haven't felt like blowing a weekend to install Win 7 yet. The thought of reinstalling all my software has kept me from getting the SSD, especially when this system has been working flawlessly. But I'm beginning to get the upgrade-bug again after seeing your results.

[Trigger5521]

I'm definitely upgrading to an SSD, but I'm not setting up a RAID. I'm still wondering if manual TRIM is an option, because I've heard the degradation in performance is pretty severe if TRIM isn't used on the drive after awhile. I've also heard that Win 7's native SATA driver is faster than nvidia's driver when it comes to SSD's and TRIM is fully supported in the driver...

I haven't felt like blowing a weekend to install Win 7 yet. The thought of reinstalling all my software has kept me from getting the SSD, especially when this system has been working flawlessly. But I'm beginning to get the upgrade-bug again after seeing your results.

I tried to use Intel's SSD tool box with the drives connected outside of the RAID controller under Vista and it kept saying RAID not supported. I think this may have been because my other conventional drives were under RAID at the same time. Dunno for sure but manual trim using the tool box was not happening under Vista...it did show the SSD drives but they were greyed out.

I have read mixed things regarding performance loss(Intel doesn't suffer from it as much as OCZ), plus Intel is working on getting the tool box to support manual trim while under RAID, this could be ready before it's even a problem for me. The boost in performance and disk size for RAID 0 gives you vs one drive and trim support weighs heavy on the RAID 0 option for me.

Edit: Did some more research, here is manual workaround to get the same effect as trim and still use RAID.

[zoson]

Just wondering if anyone has a driver that doesn't crash their computer
randomly.

Picked up a rosewill dus100 esata dock... It works great when the Jmicron controller isn't crashing/or crashing my system... The standard controller that comes with win7 doesn't work...
I've tried the 47, 53, and 55 drivers... 55 being the newest available.

Thanks!

[owcraftsman]

I'm using 15.51 with Windows 7 64bit and have no issues what so ever.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_win764_15.51.html

[zoson]

I'm using 15.51 with Windows 7 64bit and have no issues what so ever.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_win764_15.51.html

I'm not talking about the built in internal sata for nvraid. I'm talking about the Jmicron driver.

They are not the same thing.
You probably don't have the esata Jmicron device installed.

[NKrader]

somone in this thread what is safe max volts for pll vtt and northbridge and southbridge. temps are not an issue. i just cant seem to get 3.66ghz stable on my qx6700 no matter how hard I try..

[Sangrak]

I found an article that compares different SSD controllers using AHCI vs. IDE modes. I'm not sure how credible the site is, but it's an interesting read. According to their benchmarks, the Sandforce controller used in the Intel SSD's benefit from using AHCI, but not by a drastic amount. Overall, the comparison doesn't seem to favor either modes.

The article states that TRIM can be used in IDE mode, but I'm pretty certain that is incorrect. Here's a link to the article, if you're interested in giving it a read.

[owcraftsman]

somone in this thread what is safe max volts for pll vtt and northbridge and southbridge. temps are not an issue. i just cant seem to get 3.66ghz stable on my qx6700 no matter how hard I try..

Anything over default is considered unsafe and require specialty cooling at best.
I read this when you posted it because I'm subscribed to the thread and didn't answer you because of the way you asked it. Plus there are some others who frequent this thread and provide better answers than I could. IMHO below 1.6v
on all the above. There is no set answer however and you will just have to use trial and errors working your way up gradually. If you want to post your template and describe how and what is failing I might be able to point you in the right direction.

[Trigger5521]

Hope they plan nice together.

Benches as soon as I download them.

[slim142]

Ayyyy dios mio... Dual 470s please benchmarks NOWWWWW hahahaha

[Trigger5521]

Ayyyy dios mio... Dual 470s please benchmarks NOWWWWW hahahaha

What do you want to see? Heaven bench?

[Trigger5521]

Heaven it is then
All stock, latest Nvidia drivers 197.41

Fans are not obnoxious at all.

[slim142]

I know it might be kinda outdated, but I would really like to see 3dmark 06 if possible

[Trigger5521]

I know it might be kinda outdated, but I would really like to see 3dmark 06 if possible

I have a key for that...came with the SIIE. I'll run it for you.

[Trigger5521]

I know it might be kinda outdated, but I would really like to see 3dmark 06 if possible

3rd test had issues at 2560x1600. dunno how that effected the results.

Is there a particular res you wanted to see benched?

[owcraftsman]

Hey Trigger5521 thanks so very much for sharing this it's much appreciated. I too have been considering the upgrade and actually have a pre order on a 480. My only concern is bottle necking the CPU. I wonder of you could do a standard / default run of 3DMVantage with no changes or modification to the settings.ini except turning off the feature test if you want. For comparison sake I have provided a link of my S2E with 2 GTX285 SLI & PhysX enabled. Since we have very similar systems I would be very interested to see this comparison if you can help? You may need to set DX10 for example, I thinks the key is to run the test with the same settings that I have which is the program defaults, however mundane, in order to compare apples to apples This would be very helpful to other, with varying configs who may be considering the same type upgrade.

All runs were done today see system specs in my sig and the 285s are at stock clocks 648cc/1476sc/1242mc

3DMVantage
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dmv=2104959
3DM06
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=13724451

Heaven DX10 + all BMs see screenie below