I've been looking at and comparing GB's P55A and H57 boards for a couple of weeks now ... something to put my i5-750 on that has RAID. I'n not heavy into gaming so Crossfire and SLI weren't a concern. The USB 3.0 and SATA 6 were intriguing but I had a hard justifying the extra money so I got this board for the time being. I also have been following the Foxconn issue and finally got a response back from GB that all the P55A boards are using Lotes but I'm not going to OC the system, at least not that much, so that isn't a big concern either until my next board. I have 4-500Gb HDD's that I'm setting up in 2 RAID1 scenarios and a 160 Gb that I want to dual boot (Win XP Pro 32 bit and Win7-64 bit) plus my SATA DVDRW so I'm good with the 6 Sata port. SATAe would have been nice but I can live without it. From reading these forums, and others, I realize the importance of installing the latest drivers, which I have downloaded. Thank you.
So now that you have an idea of my setup ...
Are there any known issues with this board? There aren't many reviews out there for it.
I noticed that there were 2 SATA drivers for for the bios, one for a 32 bit system and another for a 64 bit ... I have both and want to be able to access the RAID drives from each. Do I need to install both and would I do that when I'm installing the systems at the F6 prompt? Now that I think about it, I think there was only a 64 bit RAID driver for the SATA 2 so maybe I don't need to worry about it?
Would it be better to set the RAID up as ACHI or RAID in the bios? On my Intel board, I have it set to RAID and haven't had any issues. What is the advantage to ACHI?
Best mid range cpu cooler for the i5-750? Also, I have a NZXT M59 case with cooling vents in fromt, side back and top so I should be able to ventilate rather well.
Right now, I have an 8500GTX graphics card. What would be good mid priced card that would handle most games and business graphics like with Photoshop?
Thanks for your input.
