GA-X58A-UD5 Revision 2.0 the MOST in Depth Review/ Analysis

[sin0822]

By just looking at this board you can see that there are a total of 12 SATA ports if you include the eSATA/USB ports on the back panel. All 12 of these ports are controlled by the very finely tuned Intel Southbridge, ICH10R, Intel also has ICH10 but it lack raid, thus the R is added to the end of the chips name to let you know it has RAID capability. In the past and even now Intel’s silicon is by far superior to the rest, in terms of overall design even the Marvell SATA6G controller can’t hold its own in overall latency and random speeds to ICH10R. ICH10R is an SATAII/3GB/S controller. Right now most SSDs and HDDs can’t even full saturate the SATA3gb/s realistic max bandwidth of about 290mb/s per drive, but Sandforce SSD drives and Crucial’s c300 series SSDs are exceptions. If you are going to use RAID on this motherboard the blue ports are the ones you want to use, they are controlled by the Iintel ICH10R and support more raid options such as raid 5 and 10 opposed to just raid 1 and 0.

ICH10R and its (0-5)Ports:


Next we have the Marvell SATAIII/6GB/S controller. Gigabyte uses the Marvell 88SE9128 which supports RAID 0 and RAID 1, not raid 1+0(you need 3 drives for that). There is also the Marvell 88SE9123 on most SATA6G capable x58 boards, but that version does not support RAID, and seems to be a little slower. The controller at the moment cannot handle RAID 0 SSDs and usually more often than not the RAID array will fail. But HDDs in raid is fine. I need to mention one more thing; gigabyte had worked closely with Marvell to develop better firmware for the controller, as that is its biggest problem. Every new BIOS seems to have a Marvell bios update and the Marvell controller has its own physical bios chip for raid, and it will update every time you flash a new bios. There is one other issue that is huge and that I do need to state again here, Gigabyte has stated this as well, DO NOT USE THE MARVELL SE9128 FOR RAID 0 SSDs. But HDDs in raid is fine. I have not seen any other manufacturer update their Marvell bios ROM as often or keep it as up to date as Gigabyte, if you are going to use SATA6G then gigabyte is the correct choice. Asus, EVGA, MSI all have the same issues if not more with their marvell controllers, yet they do not say RAID 0 SSDs is not allowed, which is so very deceitful. It’s something Gigabyte gets a shiny ribbon for.

Marvell 88SE9128 and its Bios:


A note about SATA6Gb/s: At the moment many HDDs are made that are SATA6gb/s capable, so they say. Even though they say this, it is best to use the ICH10R ports for these HDDs as most HDDs can’t surpass 200mb/s and don’t come close to breaking the SATA3gb/s barrier, thus SATA6gb/s is almost a novelty. There are a few reason that you might use the Marvell controller, and one of those cases is if you have more than 6 drives, in that case you should use the Marvell SATA6 controller over the Gigabyte SATA3gb/s which occupy one pair of the 4 white ports. The other instance in which you should use the Marvell onboard ports are if you have a Crucial C300 SATA6G SSD(made by Micron who owns Marvell and Crucial), these SSDs break through the SATA3G barrier into SATA6G territory. With a whopping 350+mb/s read speed, these drives can take advantage of the extra bandwidth, but beware; this situation has its own little caveat. I will spell them out for you and please do pay close attention. First off the Marvell 88SE9128 is one of the first SATA6G controllers, and thus isn’t perfect, just like anything out that is brand new it has its problems. First of all its random speeds such as 4k read and write are slow compared to those of ICH10R, and access time is also greater. The situation is give and take, if you do a lot of large file transfers and reads, then the Marvell SATA6G controller is great, but if you do a lot of writing, or if you just use the drive for OS (4K random ), then use the Intel ICH10R.

Installation NOTE for C300 Drives: The best way to install the C300 on the Marvell controller, is to not provide or install any Marvell drivers, Windows 7 setup will install MSAHCI.SYS, but you will need to enable AHCI mode in bios under GSATA 6_7. Then after everything is installed,(make sure to not automatically install Marvell drivers through gigabyte installation CD), you should download Marvell Console drivers(magni console) and only install them, MAKE SURE TO NOT INSTALL MARVELL DRIVERS FOR THE DRIVE< ONLY FOR THE CONTROLLER, See how to here:
( http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...5&postcount=24 )

Next we have the on-chip Gigabyte SATAII/3Gb/s controller. Physically the controller has gigabyte written on it. This controller is less than satisfactory, but in cases where you run out of ports, it can be used. I would advise that if you have SSDs and HDDs that you use ICH10R then Marvell for SSDs, and try to keep only HDDs on this controller. I have heard of a lot of problems coming from this chip, from very low transfer speeds, to performing in SATAI/1.5GB/s mode, to various bugs. But its purpose is to provide extra connectivity, not be the primary controller. I would say the ICH10R is primary, the Marvell 9128 secondary, and the Gigabyte SATA II Tertiary (3rd).
Gigabyte SATA3Gb/s and the Marvell SATA6G(6+7) + Gigabyte SATA 3G(8+9) Ports:


I need to mention that this board is equipped with a JMicron JMB362 IC that controls IDE port on this board that supports ATA-133/100/66/33 interfaces, as well as bridges gigabyte SATA2 to the PCI-E bus.