questions about GIGABYTE GA-880GA-UD3H MB

[Soupy]

I am planning on purchasing the GIGABYTE GA-880GA-UD3H MB sometime this week. My questions are,

1. Can I use all SATA ports as SATA2 ports without setting any kind of RAID? I dont have a need for sata3. I currently have a sata2 320gb drive as my boot drive, 2 eSATA drives 2TB and 1.5 TB used for storage & a Sata2 DVD drive. I will be purchasing a dual port eSATA bracket which will need two SATA ports to plug in. This is were my external drives will plug in. I may purchase a SSD Drive later down the road and use that as my boot drive then make the current Boot Drive as a small internal storage Drive.

2. Will I be able to crossfire with the on board video using a XFX HD-567X-ZNF3 Radeon HD 5670 1GB 128-bit DDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card?

3. Do you see any problems with the items listed below in this board?


Other items going into the build:
Cooler Master HAF 922 Case
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz
Corsair H70 Cooler
8GB Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model 996782
Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650-Watt TX Series PSU
Rosewill RNX-G300EX IEEE 802.11b/g PCI Wireless Card

Possible Sound card down the road if im not happy with onbaord sound.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

You havent said what revision your mortherboard is or what BIOS version you are running so I can't say for sure whether the BIOS will support the processor or not straight out of the box.

You can use all the ports as standalone ports without having to use RAID so no problems there.

There is no problem with running Crossfire on  the board as long as your cards support it.

The only problem with your list that I can see is that maybe the PSU might not be powerful enough even though the GPUs are not very high end.

[absic]

Hi there,

I think you want to know if you can run the SATA3 ports with SATA2 drives the answer is yes and you don't need to set up a RAID. Just leave the controller set as Native IDE. For the e-SATA I would suggest you use the GSATA2 ports on the motherboard as these can be configured separately. You would need to set these to AHCI in BIOS.

There shouldn't be a problem with setting up crossfire with the on-board graphics and the HD5670.

The only real problem I can see with your list of components is your choice of RAM. 8GB is fine but runningt at 1600MHz not advisable. Check this out before ordering your RAM: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2515.0.html

I don't agree with DM over this and I feel your PSU will be fine as I am running a very similar set-up on a 620W Corsair. The only problem you might face is if you decide to expand your system later on with a higher end Graphics Card or more Hard drives.

[Soupy]

Thank You for your fast responce. I will follow your suggestion and report back. It may be a couple weeks before i get the MB and put it all together. Thanks again!

[Tiger]

Using the onboard video with an add-on graphics card is called ATI Hybrid CrossFireX. You could use an HD 5450 for that, but not a HD 5670. Hybrid CrossFireX is only used with the Radeon HD 5450 or older Radeon HD 2400 Series,  Radeon HD 3400 Series cards. 

The HD 5670 is a much better choice for graphics than using Hybrid CrossFireX. The HD 5450 is an inexpensive card if you want to try using Hybrid CrossFireX on the GA-880GA-UD3H.

[absic]

You could use an HD 5450 for that, but not a HD 5670. Hybrid CrossFireX is only used with the Radeon HD 5450 or older Radeon HD 2400 Series,  Radeon HD 3400 Series cards. 

I wasn't aware of that piece of information Tiger. Why can't one of the newer cards be used in Hybrid crossfire?

[Dark Mantis]

I was also under the impression that any of the ATI cards could be used but would be limited to the lowest performing GPUs power.

[Soupy]

I decided to go with a different MB. I purchased GA-890GPA-UD3H and it should be here today or tomorrow. How should I set the Sata drives up in the bios? Im confused on what mode to use. I want the Esata drives to be hot swapable. Im planning on installing them in the SATA 2 ports. The internal boot drive and DVD burner will go into any of the SATA 3 ports.

[Soupy]

I think I got it all figured out..

[absic]

Hi there,

I would suggest that you set the SATA3 controller to AHCI and the SATA2 controller to IDE. Use the SATA2 ports for your DVD burner as sometimes there can be problems running such devices under AHCI Mode.

Your BOOT drive can safely be attached to one of the SATA3 ports. As I mentioned in your other post you won't need to add any drivers when you install Windows 7 in AHCI mode as the ones supplied by Microsoft are actually better than the AMD version.

[collidingstar]

Hybrid crossfire is something that never really worked right and they stopped supporting the newer cards at some point..

If you did normal crossfire with the 880 then it would have to share bandwidth and the PCI bus would drop from 16x down to 8x if you had two cards..

Not sure if this is the case with your new MB choice..  (I wish I knew this before I purchased it.. OH well.. )

All in all I do like my 880ga-ud3h..  I have s 5670 and it's more then enough for what I do..