Gigabyte P67A-UD7-B3 PCIExpress2 x 16 lanes & usage question

[WarYur]

HI, I am brand new to Gigabyte as this is my first motherboard and no doubt from the quality of the board that I just bought not the last.  At any rate my question regards the PCIE2 x 16 slots on my motherboard.  I will be installing 2 x GTX 480 SC graphics cards in the first two x 16 slots but I also want or need to use one of the other two x 8 slots for an LSI MegaRAID controller for two SSD's that will be in RAID 0 and also 2 x 6Gb/s WD 1TB Caviar Black hard drives in another set of RAID 0.  My controllers model number is 9240 8i and has a PCIExpress 2 interface.  What my primary concern is whether installing the card in one of the remaining PCIE2 x 8 slots will automatically lower the two graphics card slots to x 8 as well rather than the x 16 that they both are initially which of course I would prefer.  Any advice out there?

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

Nice board I have the one below it the UD5.

Yes if you use the first two PCIEx16 slots for your GPUs the next slots are x8 and if you populate them they will have hte effect of reducing the bandwidth of the corresponding x16 slot to x8. In efect this isn't as bad as it sounds as the GPU won't be able to use the full bandwidth anyway.

[WarYur]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

Nice board I have the one below it the UD5.

Yes if you use the first two PCIEx16 slots for your GPUs the next slots are x8 and if you populate them they will have hte effect of reducing the bandwidth of the corresponding x16 slot to x8. In efect this isn't as bad as it sounds as the GPU won't be able to use the full bandwidth anyway.

Hi and thanks for quick reply.  Guess I need to configure my info here as I didn't get an email telling me you had posted and then I need to put some sys specs in as well.  LOL, you have the same exact saying at the bottom of your avatar there as the Asus head mod although I can't remember his name ATM.  At any rate yes I rather figured that yours would be the answer but needed to make sure.  Now I just have to add and turn on  the TLER
thing in my WD Blacks.  Also, yes I think this board is just plain sexy if a motherboard can be that...   

[TimmyT]

I just posted a thread related to this. I initially put my 6970's in crossfire on both x16 slots. I found the first card couldn't breath properly. So I put the second card into the first x8 slot instead. My benchmark results were exactly the same! No loss in frame rates. It might be worth will putting your RAID controller into the second x16 slot and putting your second graphics card into the x8 slot as a result. You'll be getting the same performance as the other way around, but the cards will have better spacing for cooling.

TT

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

I have just answered your other thread so please don't double post although I understand that you have done it with the best intentions.

[Dark Mantis]

At any rate yes I rather figured that yours would be the answer but needed to make sure.  Now I just have to add and turn on  the TLER
thing in my WD Blacks.  Also, yes I think this board is just plain sexy if a motherboard can be that...   

If they are fairly recently purchased Western Digital Blacks they don't support TLER any more.

[WarYur]

At any rate yes I rather figured that yours would be the answer but needed to make sure.  Now I just have to add and turn on  the TLER
thing in my WD Blacks.  Also, yes I think this board is just plain sexy if a motherboard can be that...   

If they are fairly recently purchased Western Digital Blacks they don't support TLER any more.

Sorry DM, hadn't seen this one but there IS a way to add TLER and turn it on.  I found it on this thread--->>> http://www.jack-brennan.com/?page_id=214   I found other info on the Corsair forum that told me that I might have screwed up anyway in getting the blacks though as Samsung Spinpoint F3's are actually a better/faster drive for RAID arrays.  At any rate the thing with TLER on the Caviar Black's isn't a well know thing so RAMGUY on Corsair made that info a sticky...

[Dark Mantis]

Thanks for the updated info and yes I woulkd agree that even though I used to swear by the WD Blacks for many years that the Samsung F3 is a better drive now. I have just purchased a F3 1TB as a backup drive a few weeks ago and it runs perfectly. Quiet and fast. For under£40 it is hard to knock them.

As for TLER I am afraid that although it used to be possible to add it or turn it on that is no lnger the case. It has been permanently disabled by Western Digital to force people that want to use RAID to purchase their more expensive  Enterprise version drives ( which is exactly the same drive but with TLER enabled ). Please pass this on to RAMGUY as well so he can add it to the post.

[WarYur]

Thanks for the updated info and yes I woulkd agree that even though I used to swear by the WD Blacks for many years that the Samsung F3 is a better drive now. I have just purchased a F3 1TB as a backup drive a few weeks ago and it runs perfectly. Quiet and fast. For under£40 it is hard to knock them.

As for TLER I am afraid that although it used to be possible to add it or turn it on that is no lnger the case. It has been permanently disabled by Western Digital to force people that want to use RAID to purchase their more expensive  Enterprise version drives ( which is exactly the same drive but with TLER enabled ). Please pass this on to RAMGUY as well so he can add it to the post.

DM, did you happen to review the URL of the guy that had a fix for TLER on the WD Blacks?  He has a DOS based program that you burn to a cd and has to be done before going into Windows.  The program installs the TLER function on the drive and THEN you can turn it on.  It not that the drives have TLER on them and this is away to turnit on it's adding that to the drive and then turning it on by using this guys steps and if I recall correctly the post that was on the Corsair forums was a current one where I found him telling someone else about his web page and giving the URL to it.  RAMGUY only put the sticky up on 6/8/2010 and is here--->  http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=87184 

When did you find out about TLER not being able to be added to the blacks and then if I am to tell RAMGUY do you have a source of info that I could link him to that is if you are right?  Thanks!  Oh and by the wya I really liked that review on those fans you had up.

[Dark Mantis]

When I built up my X58A-UD7 system at the beginning last year I installed a pari of SATA3 Western Digital Blacks as a RAID0 on the Mavell ports of the board but unknown at the time the controller wouldn't ever make the grade so they were destined not to work. I did a lot of digging then and had some dialogue with Western Digital techs. That is when I found out about the TLER problem. If you dig deep enough the info is on their website. It use to be possible to enable TLER as you have mentioned but this stopped last year as it was blocked during manufacture.

Glad you liked the reviews. There will be some more coming shortly as I have just received some new items they want me to review.