System Questions - GA-945P-S3

[Taliseian]

Greetings all.

I guess I should first post my mobo info -- Gigabyte GA-945P-S3 rev 1.0

It has a single PATA and four SATA ports on it.

I currently have a SATA drive installed and a DVD-R and another drive on the PATA ports. I want to put my OS on the SATA drive.

Question 1 - For people who have experience with this mobo, what would be the best setting in the bios so that I get full performance from the SATA drive and will I need to use F6 to install the SATA drivers during an XP Installation?

Question 2 - I remember from older mobos that when mixing devices on a PATA channel, that the entire channel moves at the speed of the slowest device. Does that happen with SATA devices? I ask because I have several other PATA drives that I'm not using right now, but would want to install for extra storage using a PATA to SATA converter and I don't want to slow my system down too much to do this.

Question 3 - My board maxes out a 4g ram, which I have currently installed. Since I'm right at the edge, does using a 64bit OS make any sense? My video card is a 512mg PCI-E and I'm not sure if the 64bit OS will still reserve the top end memory for the card as they do with the 32bit OS - which explains why when I use a 32bit OS I'll only see 3.25g available.

Thanks in advance for the answers.....


T

 

[chookman]

A1. If you arent using RAID then setting it to AHCI will be fine and wont require F6

A2. This was not even true for PATA devices, ive seen lots of people saying its true with no GOOD resource to prove it. I dont think ive seen a PATA to SATA converter before, in any case you can only put one device on one channel so no issues here.

A3. 64Bit would be a better option because you would then be utillising all that RAM you bought (i learnt this the hard way) but if you dont have a 64bit OS laying around and you have 32Bit just use it.