Few words about Gigabyte mainboards

[igor_levicki]

I had GA8IE533, GA8PE667 and now GA8PE667 Ultra 2. What is common for all three? On board midi port doesn't show up under Windows XP. Why? Because regardlessly of BIOS choice for IRQ5 or IRQ10 it always gets IRQ9 which we all know is reserved for ACPI. So it is the BIOS error. I wrote to the Gigabyte technical support and they sent me newer version of BIOS which I already had and I even wrote that in my email to them. They also suggested to try to reserve IRQ9 in BIOS and that didn't work too. If anyone have Gigabyte mainboard with working onboard midi (MPU-401) port in Windows XP please let me know. Although I doubt there is anyone who have it. Second thing is related to GA8PE667 Ultra 2 I have now. It is about BOOT sequence. I use onboard RAID for my 2 disks. Whenever I attach someones drive to another onboard controller (intel) it tries to boot from that drive instead of my RAID. Whatever I select as first boot device (SCSI, RAID) whether I disable all boot devices it does the same - boots from that drive and not the one I want to. Faulty BIOS code again. The only way I found around that is to switch drive detection off (from auto to none) and then let Windows XP detect it. That way I get only UDMA2 trasfer for drive that supports UDMA5 because BIOS reports 40 pin cable instead of 80 pin one which is attached. I don't have any more nerves to fiddle with their lousy poor-english speaking technical support which don't understand the problem and keep sending me ~600 KB attachments with the latest BIOS which should solve my problems. Do you know what is new in latest version of BIOS for GA8PE667 Ultra 2? It is DUAL BIOS LOGO! With all these errors screaming to get corrected they dare to put only a logo into a new version of BIOS! That is why I would like to advise everyone not to buy Gigabyte products.

 

[Zoron]

To me, onboard audio has always been the devil... I've never used onboard audio in any of the two motherboards I purchased that included it. I think the nForce2 onboard audio is probably the only real decent integrated audio solution... the rest seem to just plain suck. I currently use a Sound Blaster Audigy 2.

Have you tried reassigning the IRQ within Windows? I may just enable mine to see if I can get it working (I have a 8INXP). Most of the time, sharing IRQs isn't a problem within Windows. Also, do you have PIC or APIC enabled in the BIOS?

With regards to the boot sequence problem... it does sound like a BIOS issue. The only thing I can suggest it connecting it to the secondary controller instead of the primary... that may force it to boot from the RAID instead of the primary onboard controller. Even setting it as a slave instead of a master may help.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>

 

[rubikian]

Good to point that out...