In trying to lend a hand with the community, I'm going to document my struggles with this board in the hopes that Toms forum can assist me in deciding to send it back in the hopes of getting a rev 2 board or perhaps deciding on a different board altogether, possibly the Asus P5K-E but it would seem that they are having their own issues with RAID on the ICH9R as well, but they do have ADI sound instead and that alone may be worth it because this realtek stuff just seems odd.

Here's my setup:
SOUND ISSUES ARE ISSUE independent OF THE NEXT MENTIONED RAID ISSUE, I am not even bothering with RAID on the ICH9R sata ports anymore as I have had too many issues.
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
Intel Q6600
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Windows XP sp2
Here's the fun stuff. Lets start with sound / audio.

1. This board has the realtek onboard HD sound. What I have found is that IF I have AHCI mode enabled , the sound is immediately jacked. Basically what this means is that the sound is immediately plagued with stuttering, skips, and delays in ANY audio application or video app with sound. I have used winamp , media player classic, VLC , on and on , you name it i've tried it. All the same results. IN FACT, even using the realtek bee buzzing demo produces skipping.
2. If I disable AHCI mode my issues immediately go away.
3. I have assured that I have all the latest/greatest drivers.
4. I have reloaded the OS numerous times, changed other settings in the BIOS because I figured no way in hell it was AHCI but that IS IT .
5. I have the latest BIOS from Gigabyte.
6. According to disk benchmarks , with AHCI mode disabled my disk access times are better as well. *shrug*

I'm curious if anyone could verify this if they also have the same motherboard as I do.

Next issue.

I attempted to setup RAID on this board and it seemed to work fine , here's how i attempted to do it:
Keep in mind all of these drives are/were connected to the ICH9R chipset SATA ports
1. WD 500 gb just a single OS drive
2. WD 500 gb * 2 as a RAID 1 pair.

I saw the RAID status of the RAID1 pair constantly fail and need rebuilding. I gave up and moved the pair to the "giga raid" ports and I don't seem to have any issues thus far.


Basically I'm wondering at this point if the ICH9R chipset is just crappy when it comes to any kind of RAID , I seem to be seeing alot of issues out on the net with it and RAID in general.

Now with that being said, I am wondering if sound on the Asus P5K-E would be better with the ADI setup?

I don't want to add in a sound card, but I would be willing to get a decent RAID card if indeed the ICH9R chipset is just junk for RAID applications in general.

Very happy that you posted that message, after days of struggling with the same issue on a Gigabye ga-ma69gm-s2h board. I was building a htpc with the s2h board and i installed vista with sata set to ahci in the bios. After the install i got problems with stuttering sound and video, and vista using 70-80% cpu and slowing down to a crawl.

I checked the event log and there was nothing, i installed 12.784 versions of the realtek driver, i looked for irq conflicts, reinstalled vista. And finnaly i thought i had it when i switched off all the usb ports in the bios. This was very strange Ahci enabled plus usb disabled gave perfect sound/video and vista runned normally. But without usb what can you do.. I was sure this motherboard had an irq problem as the usb uses 5 of them (!) and it was shared with the onboard sound and video.

Yesterday i was ready to call it a day and throw the whole thing on Ebay, till i found your message here on tom's. Went to the bios, switched sata from ahci to ide and everything is normal now !

However there is something seriously wrong with gigabyte boards, as my board has a totally different chipset from yours. Another htpc with an asus m2a-vm hdmi has zero problems with ahci enabled. Too bad i have to keep this gigabyte board as it's the only one that has component video out without a full size card. The pc has to fit in a low profile htpc case, lian li's pc-c35b.

Thanks for your post !

I am having the same problems and unfortunately setting the SATA to IDE did not work.

I have a 2.33GHZ core 2 Duo
1GB of DDR2 ram
ATI HD 2600 PRO hooked up via HDMI
ASUS P5K-VM MOBO (INTEL G300 chipset)

The audio stutters with both the HDMI connection and the coaxial ouput with the MOBO, I got all the most up to date drivers but I cant figure this out, I;m sure this set-up is good enough to play an MP3 in VLC.

"Now with that being said, I am wondering if sound on the Asus P5K-E would be better with the ADI setup?"

I have the same kind of audio stuttering problem with a P5K-E and its ADI chipset...

Ok bud, this one is simple. If AHCI is causing a problem, disable it. If for some reason you need it[can't imagine why...], then get a PCI sound card. Whether you want one or not, they are totally superior to onboard sound. I personally NEVER use onboard sound. It takes up CPU and system resources that would otherwise be free when good[key word there] PCI sound cards are used. I loved the Creative Labs Audigy series cards, but I have the X-Fi and it is simply amazing! Even the SB Live 5.1 would be better then onboard sound... Turtle beach makes good cards too, but they also tend to use more system resources then Audigy and X-Fi.

As far as the IHC9-R issues. The "Giga-RAID" ports are where they are supposed to be. Those ports are how the board interfaces with the RAID functions of the chipset.

ICH9R Raid port, I had no problem pairing, but the disk drivers had problems. When installing windows, u have to press F6 then problem is they always say my floppy is not copied correctly. Well... i'm sure my floppy disk and drive has no problem and I have the right drivers. Followed exact from menu. Anyway, I switched to Gigabytes RAID, gone through everything quite smoothly apart from that I forgot to set in BIOS hard disk priorities which caused XP to have some stupid conflict when installing programs and defragging. All sort out now.

O, btw, I went well with ICH9R Raid 5 though. I just want RAID 0 hence the problem came up. I don't understand why either but I'm not bothering anymore! Just stick with gigabytes RAID

Disabling AHCI doesnt solve the problem.

There is no "good" PCI sound card.
What's good is using the SPDIF output connected to a good A/V receiver. And that's what I do.

Provided I simply use the SPDIF out, there is no difference about CPU usage if I use the integrated audio chipset or another one on a PCI sound card.

tenofzero, I posted a message a few days ago about a conflict I had with onboard sound (different board, though), and the HD2600 XT. It was pegging one of my CPU's cores at 100% in the csrss.exe process. Turning off the service that supported the onboard sound solved the CPU problem - which would also tend to solve a problem with skipping sound and video.

If you search for csrss.exe, you might find it.

I would not switch of the csrss process :

This is the user-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem (with Win32.sys being the kernel-mode portion). Csrss stands for client/server run-time subsystem and is an essential subsystem that must be running at all times. Csrss is responsible for console windows, creating and/or deleting threads, and some parts of the 16-bit virtual MS-DOS environment.

Same problem, same solution here!

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 rev 1.0. Audio has gaps and clicks - like a buffer overflowing. Can't listen to CDs or make a VOIP call cleanly. Interestingly, the same problem happens on both speaker (via motherboard Realtek chip) and USB headset.

Spent a couple of frustrating days trying everything and searching everywhere.

I had RAID1 running with two WD Raptors, on the Intel RAID chip, with latest drivers for Realtek, Intel chipset, Matrix Storage Manager etc.

Turning off RAID and going back to plain old SATA drives appears to have fixed the sound problem.

I solved a problem very much like this today, and I was lucky to come across the solution. I searched high and low to find it.

For me, my sound/mouse/video would stutter when my hard drive was accessed sometimes. I had just replaced the motherboard since my last one died. My old motherboard was an Asus P5W/DH and the new one is a P5K. I'm running core2duo 6300, 2GB of ram, and 2 IDE HDD's. Both motherboards have a JMicron HDD controller, and I was sure to update the driver in windows when I put the new mobo in.

The solution came from HERE (I don't want to claim it as my own idea!)
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthrea [...] ge=2&pp=25

and more specifically, a file from here:
http://www.station-drivers.com/page/jmicron.htm

It's as simple as this: the JMicron driver that was bundled with the P5K installed itself automatically for SATA. I don't have SATA, I have IDE drives. When I downloaded the driver from the above site, it actually asked me if I have SATA or IDE. Once I chose IDE, the problem was INSTANTLY fixed. (also, the "updated" drivers from the ASUS website didn't fix my problem)

I can't tell you how many forums I read to finally get the solution, and there's so many people making so many diagnoses' about temperature levels, graphics card drivers, and so on, and they haven't actually suffered the problem themselves.

And then, when each person solves the problem for themselves, they are then happy, and probably don't bother to let everyone else know how!

My raid(on the ICH9r) works fine on the P35 DS3R....

It was created on my P5W DH, but I do not think that matters much...

Also all 6 ports are full with no problems. but i do not have AHCI as far as i know either...

When the ICH9R controller is set as RAID, it automatically enabled ACHI as well (for the remaining ports).

I had a ton of trouble getting Win x64 installed on the P35C-DS3R (floppy issues above), and was able to finally get up and running by using UBCD4Win and the copying the drivers for both the ICH9R and the Gigabyte RAID controller to the System32, System32/Drivers and Inf directories once the installer had copied everything over to my RAID5 setup (you might want to consider slipstreaming the install, though).

I'll make this suggestion, too... don't mess around with the Stripe size on the ICH9R. Leave it at 64KB. I tried a couple of different Stripe sizes based on some performance gains I've seen in the past with other controllers, and my read time plummeted.

I didn't even bother trying the onboard sound as it usually stinks... I will suggest the bGears B-Enspirer soundcard, though. It'll upmix anything on the fly to 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 and output Dolby Digital or PCM. Worth the $90 or so buck imho.

Hi Guys

Just build a new graphics workstation here and having issues with windows install...
DS3R / Corsair 2GB PC6400C4 / 2x 500 GB samsungs(on gsata ports in raid0) / 8800GTS

Windows boot loader will blue screen if I don't F6 for additional drivers, and will load the gigaraid drivers if I do press F6 and then displays 2 unknown drives and blue screens if i try anything from there. Turned AHCI on and off with no difference. Please Help.

did you make the boot disk?

pressing F6 tells the computer to look on its floppy drive. If you dont have on borrow one and use the gigabyte CD to make a F6 disk for GSATA....

Then when you try to boot windows insert the disk.....press F6 and it should load the drivers off it.....

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support [...] uctID=2543
near the bottom there are drivers for 32 bit and 64 bit windows systems...

this file will extract what you need....then place those files on a disk....

Indeed the boot disk is a must for pre-vista raided systems. I have since plugged the samsungs into the ICH9R and raided it that way with no issues or blue screens .... is this an indication of a bad/faulty gsata processor/ports?

Maybe vista has Intel Matrix drivers built in? Gsata(J micron) is less common..

I know i needed a driver for XP with ICH9r (raid 0)

I only use the Intel ones anyway...since they are a little faster and such...The g-sata's are set to IDE mode for use with DVD drives and temp drives(E-sata)