New Motherboard

[Blackthorn]

Having only just realised just how limited my current Asus P5K-SE is, I'm planning on buying a new motherboard when I upgrade to Windows 7. Seeing as I know next to nothing about them, I thought I would ask here for any recommendations.

I'm looking for a MB under £100, and even lower if possible, that supports Quad-Core, SATA II and has decent overclocking support.

 

[huntingbear]

do you want DDR3 dual channel or triple channel? do you want AM2+ or AM3? Are you willing to wait for SATA 6.0 ?

 

[Blackthorn]

My RAM is currently DDR2, but it would be nice to have room to upgrade later. As for the rest, you may as well have spoken French.

 

[Asus]

What is limiting about your board that you want it to do? Looked it up under newegg and it says it supports Intel Core 2 Quads and 3GB/s SATA.

 

[VirusType2]

Are you willing to wait for SATA 6.0 ?

6.0? What? Are there any hard drives that can even saturate SATA 2 yet ?

 

[Blackthorn]

What is limiting about your board that you want it to do? Looked it up under newegg and it says it supports Intel Core 2 Quads and 3GB/s SATA.

Well it doesn't seem to be supporting those speeds from what I'm seeing, in device manager it's shown as IDE, with ATA 100 as the speed, despite being connected with a SATA cable. In the BIOS it says it's running via IDE emulation, which is the only option available for the motherboard. There are some Intel SATA controllers available in device manager, but neither show any options for Transfer Mode, so I can't set it for 3GB/s. HD Tune identifies the transfer rate as 100MB/s.

 

[VirusType2]

That's weird. I guess you tried turning off emulation / changing the setting?

 

[Blackthorn]

Yup, I tried, but I found out from the Asus forums that IDE emulation in the only setting available. It's possible to force other motherboards in the P5K series to use AHCI and RAID, but there's no way with the P5K-SE.

 

[Asus]

It looks like the chip does support 3 Gb/s but Asus has disabled the bios option depending on your bios version. So earlier ones had the option there.
read me
I don't know how well you know your way around PCs or if you would be scared to do something like flashing the bios but it could save ya $$. (i wouldn't suggest it if you aren't familiar with doing so)
Anyway, the difference in 1.5 vs 3 Gb/s will depend on your drive but it isn't a ton. And it only limits the burst speed NOT sustained transfer rate (unless you have a SSD). benchmark

FYI technically the only thing called SATA II is the group that makes up the spec. All the 3 Gb/s features etc is part of SATA (1). So you can't accurately filter boards that don't say "SATA 2" since some pull the name out for marketing but others say it like they should and say "this SATA port supports 3Gb/s".
Like when you pull down Interface they say SATA 3.0Gb/s

 

[Blackthorn]

I had previously read that post regarding flashing the BIOS, but that applies to the P5K, which is different from the P5K-SE. I don't know whether the same fix applies to both, but with no confirmation of this I wouldn't want to risk causing myself problems.

What I'm wondering is what exactly the function of IDE emulation is. Does it inhibit/ negate entirely SATA, or does it only cause the OS to treat the HDD as IDE when it is still running as SATA?

 

[huntingbear]

6.0? What? Are there any hard drives that can even saturate SATA 2 yet ?

SSD's

 

[Asus]

I'm pretty sure there is not much performance difference between running a SATA port as AHCI vs Legacy IDE (emulation).

But some features get dropped (NCQ and hotplug) that need to use AHCI which could be the reason for slight performance differences. With NCQ enabled performance either lowers slightly with normal use or speeds up with intense multi-task file access.

Green bars are the same SATA drive just with NCQ enabled or not.