[Mental_Myopia]

I saw this explained in another post, forgot to print it out, and now can't locate it.

Someone had described a cool way to make the best use of the hard drive controllers on this motherboard to burn CD's, taking full advantage of the controller chips so that data flow would make a full circle. The writer mentioned setting the CD burning software to make a copy of the CD to one drive, and then have it go around to the IDE contoller to burn the CD.

Could someone please point me in the direction of this, or copy and paste that information here for myself and others? I'm trying to figure out the best place for my two SATA drives to be attached to on my Asus P4C800-E Deluxe.
:winking:

 

[clintfan]

I think this is probably what you were looking for: P4c800_E Deluxe....Questions

You may also find ASUS P4C800E-Deluxe IDE Device Hookup useful.

-clintfan

 

[Mental_Myopia]

Perfect! Thanks!

I've finally gotten around to powering up, and the Asus and nVidia BIOS both posted successfully! With 5 case fans, 2 PSU fans, the CPU fan, and the GPU fan, it's actually quieter than I thought it would be!

My next step will be a gutsy flash from version 9 to 11 BIOS on the Asus, then I'll install XP, the Intel INF, then the rest of the drivers which I pre-downloaded and burned to a CD.

Has someone printed out a BIOS tweak guide to the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe yet?

My system:
Antec Plus1080AMG case with optional front fans
Antec 430W ATX 12V TruePower
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB
Corsair TWINX1024-3200LLPT 1GB DDR400 (x2)
BMG Tech GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB
Philips PSC706 Acoustic Edge
Maxtor DM+9 6Y080M0 80GB SATA (x2)
Samsung SC-152 and SM-352
Philips 109B 19" CRT
Logitech Elite Keyboard
Logitech MX500 Mouse

Thanks again!

 

[clintfan]

Great! On mine, I'm starting to think the little video fan is the noisiest of the bunch.

When you get all this working and are happy with it, can I get you to add it to the "Working" thread? Thanks-

-clintfan

 

[twobucks]

hey clintfan i don't know if i agree with you on how to hook up drives for the maximum throughput. check out this block diagram for the i875 chipset and you might see what i mean. look closely at the sata channels and the ide channels going to the southbridge. They are each on thier own channel to the ich5/r but the pci bus shares with any pci card you might have and all the ports for the promise controller.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030414/i875p-01.html

 

[Mental_Myopia]

I've had my eye on posting my system to that thread as I've been building it! In fact, that "working" thread was the one I hit on Google to find these excellent forums! As soon as everything has been updated in XP and I work out any more kinks that pop up, I'll be proud to post to that thread.
:winkgrin:

What messages should I be getting with nothing attached to the Promise RAID controller? In post, it says nothing is attached, which is correct, then it says it can't find the Promise BIOS, and then XP says it can't start the device. I assume this is normal? I don't want to go to the trouble of sticking something on the Promise simply to test it out.
:tongue2:

In BIOS, I have Turbo turned on, as well as some sort of acceleration. What kind of damage can I do by increasing the aparture size from 64 to 128? I've got a GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB card operating at AGP 4x since the card doesn't support 8x.

Please point me in the direction of a BIOS guide for the mobo...

 

[clintfan]

i don't know if i agree with you on how to hook up drives for the maximum throughput. check out this block diagram for the i875 chipset...

Sounds like a good discussion! :winkgrin:

Been there, seen that, way back in May. Unfortunately these are not block diagrams of the internals of the chips. They are pretty Marketing slides to show in meetings. Intel has basically the same thing on their website for the 875P chip.

Actually, nobody except Intel themselves truly knows how these chips are truly organized inside. It's proprietary information, and they're not publishing the internal flow. The diagrams are conceptual and simplified. But I've done a lot of study of this, and FWIW I'll try to get something slightly more concrete up later tonight or tomorrow.

Bottom line: boosting the central data path to a proprietary 266 MB/s hub interface, instead of a standard PCI bus at 133 MB/s, makes all the difference in the world.

-clintfan

 

[clintfan]

Well this isn't exactly architecture, but since it's your thread..............

What messages should I be getting with nothing attached to the Promise RAID controller? In post, it says nothing is attached, which is correct, then it says it can't find the Promise BIOS, and then XP says it can't start the device. I assume this is normal? I don't want to go to the trouble of sticking something on the Promise simply to test it out.

This has been mentioned many times before; I just did a search of the mobo forum for "promise and devices and found" and got Help with P4C800-E Deluxe, among others. The Search button is in the blue toolbar above.

I don't have the exact messages at my fingertips, guess I forgot to copy them over here. But I believe first it puts up the FastTrack banner, then it says nothing is attached, then it says BIOS not loaded. Something like that. If it does find drive(s) then it lists those drives (e.g. D1 Maxtor 6Y160M0). The messages about no drives found and BIOS not loaded are warnings to you, in case you thought you had plugged drives in there, but for some reason they aren't working.

Please point me in the direction of a BIOS guide for the mobo...

All there is is just the regular Asus manual for the P4C800-E Deluxe mobo, and the "BIOS History" link off the BIOS Download page, sorry I can't grab a link to the History. There is also a Quick Start Guide for the Promise FastTrak 378 RAID which is found in the "Manual" folder on your Asus install CD, I don't think it's on the download site anywhere. I was looking at this last night, it's an MSWord document.

Hope this helps,

-clintfan