"Strange" AHCI performance results with Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H

[Vezina]

I ve just bought the 890GPA-UD3H revision 2.1 with BIOS FF.
The board is ok ,but look at this "strange" HDD burst speeds .
Somehow the J Micron is superior to the AMD SB.
Is this normal ?!
The OS used is W7 Home SP1 32 bit.

 This is the JMicron 363 onboard controller with latest AHCI 2011 (1.17.63) driver



 And here is the SB 850 one with the Gigabyte AHCI (what is for download now ) .Siimilar results gives the Catalyst 10.6 AHCI driver package as well .


   

 The question is how is that J Micron able to get a 300+ burst speed  while the AMD southbridge is not able ?!

With the same HDD on  K9A2 Platinum Promise T3(JBOD) i ve had 140~ megs , on  AMD SB 600 around 190 megs ,on AMD SB 7xx (on the 770-UD3 and MSI 790XT-G45) i ve had 160- 170 megs and on this SB 850 never got over 180 megs.
With Windows 7 32 bit Microsoft drivers had under 190 megs as well in burst speed.

From  my knowledge a SATA 2 drive should have ~ 300 megs burst speed.

After connecting the WD to the J Micron the HDD seems to make less noise and the drive is not accesed as often as before.It even made BF BC2 to run smoother.

So is there a compatibility problem between WD drives and the AMD southbridge that could be solved via a BIOS update ?!
Or the J Micron using a PCI-E link is simply performing properly ?!
Wanted to get a new  SATA 3 HDD drive ,but seeing this burst speed thing i m not so sure.

So anybody else noticed this ?!

In  this review here we see the opposite -> http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1236/13/  
Could Gigabyte "fix" the SB 850 via a BIOS update ,as they did with the J Micron controller?!

I m not complaining about the J Micron beeing closer to what the speeds should be .It s just that  i considered the SB 850 better.
Whats the use of getting a new SATA 3 'normal'(non SSD) HDD if the burst speed is not what it should be (burst speed beeing the only thing that should be higher on this mechanical drives while going for higher specs).

[absic]

Hi there,

What burst speed do you get if you use the Microsoft AHCI Drivers not the AMD ones? I have actually found that the Microsoft drivers perform better on my own system.

[Vezina]

Hi !

I now realize that it slipped my mind to test with the Microsoft ones on the Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H as well .

Just removed the HDD with the  W7 install from the 770-UD3 ,with the AMD AHCI 10.6 version installed ,and plugged it in the new mobo.Then loaded the mobo disc driver and the Gigabyte website AHCI AMD drivers ,switching between them back and forth.
From my previous tests the machine seems smoother and boots faster when i use a AHCI driver that gives me more than 175 megs burst.

The same WD drive never got more than 190 megs on my other boards (MSI K9A2 Platinum ,MSI 790XT-G45 ,Gigabyte 770-UD3 v2.0) with the Microsoft drivers ,neither the drive beeing seen as removable or as non removable (as per SATA BIOS version used).

Never got more with Microsoft IDE mode as well ,that s why the J Micron is quite a pleasant surprise for me.
I m glad i did not bought one of the AMD 9xx based mobos right now

I ll retest this days with the Microsoft one , but i hope someone will manage to confirm(or not) this with the same mobo.

If it s a AMD controller limitation ill simply not upgrade for a SATA 3 mechanical drive , it s not a big issue.
Maybe it s a drive firmware issue of some sort also.

[autotech]

The AMD drivers have always been the slowest for AHCI period. Plenty of topics on the ssd forums about it. As absic says the microsoft ones are usually the best besides intels.

[malum]

The AMD drivers have always been the slowest for AHCI period.

Why did you say period before the period? 

[Vezina]

I will come with more info on the thread ,after i get my new HDD drive next week on which i will test again the speeds.It will be a  newer SATA 3 WD performance drive.At this moment the WD drive runs very smooth in the J Micron ,to lazy for this week-end to open the PC and move the SATA connector.

In the mean time please don t troll my thread.If you have tested on the same mobo the AHCI then ok ,post info , if not please don t troll.

The AMD drivers have always been the slowest for AHCI period. Plenty of topics on the ssd forums about it. As absic says the microsoft ones are usually the best besides intels.

I m not so sure as the SATA optical unit takes less time to copy things with the AMD driver only.
The Sony optical drive is connected to the SB 850 at this moment and with the Windows AHCI drivers it needs 15 minutes to install BF BC 2 from the disk .
On SB 7xx with the AMD driver it needs only 10-11 minutes.
With IDE Mode in BIOS + IDE Windows drivers  it needs 20 minutes.

In my case i suspect some kind of incompatibility with the HDD drive.

But once i get the new HDD drive i will post more info.

[autotech]

Thank you and please do keep us posted any information can only help others. Something id like to ask you is why are you using it in AHCI mode if you are not using a SSD drive. Most people use it SSD drives I use mine in sata mode for my raid 0 config.

[Vezina]

Thank you and please do keep us posted any information can only help others. Something id like to ask you is why are you using it in AHCI mode if you are not using a SSD drive. Most people use it SSD drives I use mine in sata mode for my raid 0 config.

I use AHCI because the performance is better while doing multiple things  in same time ,things that need HDD access.Better I/O performance as the IDE Mode has some limits regarding  I/O stuff.My specific drive tends to be a little more noisy in IDE Mode as well for some reason.AHCI is a plus over IDE Mode in my opinion.
Even the SATA optical drive is faster , like i said in my upper post.If you do things faster with AHCI why not use it ?!

[Vezina]

Here are the Burst speeds with the brand new Western Digital 750 G/64 megs cache /Black Edition (WD 7502AAEX) SATA 3 HDD :

J Micron AHCI driver



AHCI Microsoft driver for SB 850



AHCI AMD 10.12 Catalyst driver for SB 850 (11-11-2011)



The weakest performance in transfer rate and in burst speed  is with the Microsoft driver( i was expecting this ), this beeing a driver from 2006.
HDD write caching policy had all options checked in all tests pictured in this thread.

The brand new SATA 3 HDD drive plugged into the SATA 3 SB 850 ports has now the BURST SPEED performance of the previous SATA 2 HDD drive pluged into the J Micron SATA 2 controller ,but most probable the Burst should of been 600 Megs per second ,if i m not mistaking, in the SB 850 SATA 3 controller.

Anyway with a SATA 3 drive plugged into SB 850 SATA 3  controller i can have the burst speed of the J Micron + a SATA 2 HDD ,so now i may use the southbridge controller to get the maximum out of the new drive.
Nevertheless there seems to be an issue with the SB 850 regarding burst speeds.

Anyway now i know that if get my hand on some SATA 2 drive i should install it into the J Micron and not into the southbridge ports.  
  

[Vezina]

Has anybody managed to find out in the mean time why the SB 850 southbridge ( which is identical to SB 9xx)  is advertised at  SATA 3 having in mind that with a SATA 3 drive it will run at SATA 2 burst speeds.
Or why with a  SATA 2 drive goes down to SATA 1 ?!
Is it the chip ,the BIOS ?!

This are the burst speeds corresponding to each SATA version , in case somebody reading here doesnt understand what i m referring to.

SATA1 or SATA/150 = 1,5Gbps or 150MB/s
SATA2 or SATA/300 = 3,0Gbps or 300MB/s
SATA3 or SATA/600 = 6,0Gbps or 600MB/s

[madbrain]

I ran into the same problem with this board. Mine is a rev 2.0 . It looks like Gigabyte has just solved the problem with the beta BIOS rev FGF.
I posted about this at http://blog.madbrain.com/2011/09/gigabyte-ga-890gpa-ud3h-rev-20.html .
To achieve the best speed, you need to use the AMD AHCI compatible driver. Go to amd.com under support and "8-series" chipset driver.
Sadly, the RAID driver is much slower. I tried to setup a RAID 0 array with 2 SATA 3.0 hard drives, but this slows down the tw SATA 3.0 SSDs on the other ports a lot, even though they are not in RAID :-(