Mainboard Or OS limited?

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by omegaman7, Nov 16, 2008.

  1. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    I hear ya. Not much of a gamer myself. Sometimes though, to pass time during rip/burn i'll play some splashspot, but thats about it. I believe my 2001 hp has a 6100 evga nvidia, this machine has an 8600gt. I ran gears of war on it once. NICE! installed in 17min too.
     
  2. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    Im hoping you see this creaky(since you have a sata add on), but other opinions welcome. I just added an add on card to my pci-e X1 slot. I am UNABLE to change the DMA setting. No advanced features! Bios is limited for options (enable/disable). My dvd burners will not pass 0.8x read/write speeds. Any thoughts. Know that I installed the card FIRST. Rebooted, card acknowledged installed. Then I installed both dvd burners to the card. Both installed fine. But I cant seem to effect their dma mode. Ive seen multiple reviews stating that its good for HDD's but not dvd burners! Surely that cant be true. None of my documentation states that, neither does the startech website.
    http://www.startech.com/item/PEX2IDE-1-Port-PCI-Express-IDE-Adapter-Card.aspx
    It says that it supports all udma modes. Shouldnt I be able to connect ANY ide device reguardless of type??? Any thoughts GREATLY appreciated :D
     
  3. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    It's been about a year since i added my SATA PCI-e card. If i remember correctly it's got some annoying jumpers on it with an incomprehensible manual ie a pointless crappy bit of paper.
    Anyways, mine was a real cheapy one so i just hung my 2 SATA burners off it. The last time i tried a simultaneous burn using both SATA burners the write speed was crap beyond belief so since then i only so simultaneous burns with up to 3 Benq IDE burners (in USB2.0 enclosures) and 1 of the SATA's.
    I'd always planned to replace the crappy SATA card with a decent one. The best one i'd read about was the Promise TX4, but they're about £60. (My cheapy one has 4 ports but you can only configure it to use 2 at a time but hey, i only bought it for 2 ports anyways).

    Re SATA and DMA, here's a snippet from a Nero logfile -

    I don't know much about DMA and SATA, other than there's supposed to be no such thing as DMA on SATA drives; in the snippet above the SATA hard drives show as ATAPI, there must be some sort of SATA-IDE conversion going on, but i'm only interested in stuff like this if it ain't working :)
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2008
  4. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    mmmm... I read about a card like yours. Do you think I simply need a bios upgrade? Cause I dont think, but I could be mistaken that this card has no jumper. Besides, what would an ide port be without BOTH channels able to be used? Its a one slot card, dual channel of course. Im really gritting my teath on this one. THANK YOU for the quick reply man. VERY appreciated.
    Mmm... Know anything about the LIVE msi update to bios???
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2008
  5. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Ooops i overlooked your question re IDE.
    Aww that's a cute diddy little card you got there. It should definitely 'just work' though, and both channels at that..

    edit-
    it does seems to have it's own Bios then, you should be able to access it during bootup...
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2008
  6. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    LOL. Thats EXACTLY what I said when I looked at it! ROFLMAO
    Ok... im uncertain how to do that. Del, enters my mainboard bios, and I dont get much for this card. Enable/disable.
     
    Last edited: Dec 27, 2008
  7. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    You should reboot and keep your eyes peeled for a prompt from the PCI card, ie to know what key to press (and when) to access it's BIOS, presuming you can access it's BIOS.
     
  8. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    LOL, I have :) It shows the devices attached. Shows it for about 1 sec, then xp splash screen. NO options :( Oh well. GM showed me a couple cards. AND I ran a different search at newegg. VERY disapointed with newegg. There site is NOT very organized. I blaim myself, but... its a shame I found the device I would have bought in the first place, had it been in the right section. Im giving up on this MICRO/baby pci e card. Rosewill has one showing GOOD successs!
     
  9. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    Well... Startech got back to me. They asked me if I could see the advanced settings in the controller section of device manager. I laughed, as im aware of the function, :D I gather by their confusion, this card SHOULD be able to handle dvd/cd drives. I look forward to hearing back from them. PRETTY SLOW customer service! Hopefully they can tell me how to enter its bios, or flash its f/w. As my iHAP422 had a corrupt f/w out of the box(guess big dog industry screws up every now and again LOL). Atleast im pretty sure... Flashing to new firmware fixed it right up :D
     

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