I've been attempting to build a cheap Media Center PC from OLD stuff I've had laying around and I've been just running into frustration after frustration with it. The latest that I've not been able to work around is that the Motherboard I have has a Intel H61 Express Chipset that must be Intel's bastard stepchild which seems not to have any AHCI driver support given by them (for the Windows 8 64 Bit OS).
The Basics:
Zotac H61MAT-A-E Motherboard
Intel G2030 LGA1155 CPU
G.Skill 2GB DDR3-1333 PC3-10666 x 2 Sticks
OCZ Arc 100 240GB SSD
MSI N650-1GD5/OC Graphics Card
Windows 8.1 Standard 64Bit OS
Short story, no matter what Intel driver package I download, version 9 thru 13 - from either Zotac's download site or Intel's website, none give me AHCI capability for the H61 express chipset.
My web searches seem to indicate that the H61 wasn't Intel's best and I think even Intel's version 12 drivers has AHCI support for series 5, 7, and 8 chipsets but no series 6.
I guess I'm to the point of just accepting it unless someone here has any bright ideas. I'm not even sure what all I'm losing not having the SSD run in AHCI other than I believe it helps in garbage collection and automatic maintenance so the SSD runs faster. I could pop the SSD out every month or so and stick it into one of my other AHCI capable computers as a secondary drive so it can get some clean-up time if need be.
This set-up is mainly going to be a Media Center PC but I'm sure it will have some games on it, but more likely older classics rather than the latest higher resource heavy ones.
The Basics:
Zotac H61MAT-A-E Motherboard
Intel G2030 LGA1155 CPU
G.Skill 2GB DDR3-1333 PC3-10666 x 2 Sticks
OCZ Arc 100 240GB SSD
MSI N650-1GD5/OC Graphics Card
Windows 8.1 Standard 64Bit OS
Short story, no matter what Intel driver package I download, version 9 thru 13 - from either Zotac's download site or Intel's website, none give me AHCI capability for the H61 express chipset.
My web searches seem to indicate that the H61 wasn't Intel's best and I think even Intel's version 12 drivers has AHCI support for series 5, 7, and 8 chipsets but no series 6.
I guess I'm to the point of just accepting it unless someone here has any bright ideas. I'm not even sure what all I'm losing not having the SSD run in AHCI other than I believe it helps in garbage collection and automatic maintenance so the SSD runs faster. I could pop the SSD out every month or so and stick it into one of my other AHCI capable computers as a secondary drive so it can get some clean-up time if need be.
This set-up is mainly going to be a Media Center PC but I'm sure it will have some games on it, but more likely older classics rather than the latest higher resource heavy ones.