Asus P5Q E Bios tweaks ?

[outsounder]

Hi every one

Theres quite a few people on here now using the Asus P5Q E range of mobo's, myself included.

There's quite a comprehensive BIOS on it - any one got any good tweaks that streamline it, save a few resources and are stable for use with Scope?

For myself, all i've done is disabled th onboard sound, energy savings, boot options etc. I just thought it would be interesting to hear what Scope users with this mobo have done. I hven't bothered with all the overclocking etc, I have little knowledge or confidence in that area.

Cheers

[outsounder]

That's intersting on the AHCI - do you have raid setup? I don't though I do swap data drives quite often for differing projects. I've been thinking of upgrading the case to a hot swap but haven't got round to that yet.

There's a lot of talk on different forums that AHCI is important for full SATA data transfer rates, though i've never tried it myself. I've disabled some USB and fire wire seems to be not so important now as eSATA seems to be the preference for back up and external drives.

What did you install off the Asus utilities disk? I don't use my music machine for internet except to register software so didn't see the need for the fast gate nor the Asus update, I don't see any need for BIOS updates going on in the background and not so sure about the A1 thingy either. Every thing is running fine so don't want to upset it, though it's good to be able to save differing profiles so i'm happy to play around with it all knowing i can just rturn to base.

One little thing that's really bugged me from clean windows only instal right up to present with everything installed is a yellow question mark in the device manager for an unkown PCI device, tried everything to get rid of it with no luck, it doesn't cause any problems at all, i'm just annoyed because I don't know why, maybe it's because i've never plugged in the HD/AC7 sound header into the mobo, the leads are neatly tucked away.

I haven't plugged the DVD drive audio in either, I only ever use it for it for installs and copying, if i'm ripping audio off DVD or CD it's not a problem as Wavelab uses the Scope Asio drivers any way and. I do have a small set of USB speakers plugged in, they're usefull if i want to tinker without having to boot up the enitire studio.

[outsounder]

Hmm...thats interesting, a number of people have mentioned that some western digital drives are noisey, espacially OEM's.

The best way to reduce any noise is to use the Hitachi Drive utlity (vers 2.11) and switch on the accoustic management, ti will also set sata drives to full 300 mb/s again a lot of OEM's are set to 150 mb/s

It's a good utility, it runs in a dos window and works with most makes of drives, though after vers 2.11 the removed the accoustic managment utilty and saves messing around with the AHCI

I just use the inf. off the asus utilty disk as you mention not a lot of need for the rest, i did install them when i first had the board just to play around to see what they done, I only had windows on there at that time so I done a fresh install of xp before installing scope and all my music software.

[spacef]

>>> Most of the other stuff is nice but not needed, right.

The Asus AI suite is actually better than Asus Probe for tweaking fan speed, checking probes and making a user profile for the cpu. the rest is not needed.

[NikoleMccarr]

Hmm I found that raid was quite helpful performance wise. Not by much but I definitely noticed a difference in speed.

Did you learn anything from this 3 Week Diet review when you read it?

[dawman]

RAIDs' advantage IMHO when using it for audio is the way it provides extra seeking heads for the content necessary.
This could seem like speed, but actually makes accesses snappier.

An SSD won't have the throughput everyone dreams of because there's only so much usable bandwidth with these apps we have.
But the SSD does allow massive polyphony which I consider a major advantage since I need uninterupted Piano emulations without voice stealing.
My pedalling is really good when I sit down but I perform standing up and use several pedals and sometimes the pedal gets over used.
On my old 10k Raptors using Kontakt 4.1 and PianoTeq I could hear the voice stealing as a long run would re trigger the sustain.
The SSD will take forearm falls with full sustain and even stacked Horn layers....no problemmo.

FWIW a friend of mine bought a REVO OCZ PCI-e RAID SSD card for 2 large.....barely an improvement in streaming........but better him than me.....
I think theres' just limitations on the interfaces we use. While a synthetic benchmark shows 580MBps, the app just doesn't show much difference in real world usage.
Actually a 64MB cache on a 7200 rpm drive is almost as good as my SSD from what I have seen.

Asus has had a long streak of making excellent boards for gamers which means they're good for audio too.
Ankyu.