abit AB9 QuadGT Motherboard Review :: General Usage

Normally I talk about first boot, general installation of Windows XP and give a short overview on how the board performs in general usage situations. I like to get a real-world feel on the hardware I review, using it as my primary gaming machine for at least two weeks before writing the review. Today I'm breaking the trend a little.

Normally with First Boot, you would install a single stick of memory, the video card, the CPU and turn on the computer to see if it successfully passes POST (Power On Self Test.) The AB9 QuadGT successfully passed POST. At this point I opened up the BIOS Setup Screen set the JMB363 RAID controller to IDE (as it controls the external SATA ports which could be RAIDed), turned the onboard SATA controller to RAID, and shut off the computer. The next step was to install the second memory stick, the two HDDs (more on this shortly), the FDD and the DVD-ROM drive.

Anticipating no problems, as first boot was successful and the RAID controllers were successfully set up, I turned on the computer. First problem was the computer would not find the RAID drives! Turning off the computer, going into the BIOS and changing the RAID controller to IDE to see if the computer would find the drives, I restarted again. At this point the two Raptor SATA drives from WD WERE detected by the system. Scratching my head, I went to check abit's manual. Unfortunately, the included manual had only a picture of the SATA ports, where to plug them in and a single page on the BIOS, making it difficult if not impossible to find the RAID array setup.

After fooling around with the settings I could indeed set the drives into RAID mode, ONLY if the corresponding JMB363 controller was disabled in the BIOS! This brought the added problem of disabling the DVD-ROM with which Windows XP would be installed off of. After much thinking and several hours of fruitless settings changes, I went on the Net to find answers.

The first step was to determine whether an updated BIOS was released. After all, the issue occurs before the system gets to the OS, meaning that anyone with two HDDs in RAID array would likely have the issue and hopefully updated BIOS would fix the issue.

First up was abit-usa.com, abit's US website. Going to their BIOS download page I found that their AB9 QuadGT was not yet listed.

In fact, their BIOS download section only had the AB9, and the AB9 Pro listed as P965 boards, despite the fact that they have at least four boards on their site on this chipset. That's ok, I thought, it's a new board right? I entered the name of the board, and found that the original BIOS dated 12/06/2006 was the only one listed for this board. All right, having gone through this process, I decided a little Googling would be in order. First thing that popped up was abit's website's Forums which showed that new BIOS had been released on 3/27/2007 to resolve the issues with the JMB363 RAID controller not working at the same time as the Intel ICH8R. After Flashing the BIOS I was good to go, as no further setup issues occurred in XP or in Vista. Make sure to check that you have BIOS 1.1 so that the RAID issue doesn't happen to you.

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