What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Well... bugger... that didn't do anything (pulling the SLI'd card). Back to the drawing board. Wish I kept track of what driver combination that was. The other thing I did was to install different ram chips -that should affect the results, should it?

Note 1 in the board spec webpage

When dual graphics cards are used in 1st and 2nd PCIex16 slots, SATA3 / USB 3.0 (Marvell 9128 /NEC USB 3.0 Controllers) will work at normal mode.

This make it very clear that they "steal" bandwidth from the PCIe x 16, something that is not shown in the block diagram.
The image of the chipset block diagram is misleading as well, even though it says each lane is 500MB/s it is in fact just 250MB/s as you can see in the product brief just below the same image.

[profJim]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

When dual graphics cards are used in 1st and 2nd PCIex16 slots, SATA3 / USB 3.0 (Marvell 9128 /NEC USB 3.0 Controllers) will work at normal mode.

Nice find Chike.

What kind of bull dung is this? Normal = crippled mode?
If you want to run SLI, all you have to do is use the rest of the advanced features with "un-advanced" performance levels!!!

I've seen this type of dung to some extent with other brands, but not this crippled.
If this is what I have to look forward to with Ivy Bridge, I'm staying with my P35 system.
I might edit this post a little after I've cooled down a bit.
Naw, I'll let it be.

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

By normal i guess it means they go through the PCIe x1 lane.
Actually the could give up the JMB chip and one LAN port and run the USB3.0 and SATA3 in PCIe x2, which is enough for the USB and "almost" enough for SATA3.

Well the Sandy Bridge already has 2 SATA3 ports on the chipset so no problem there.

[profJim]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Which benchmark test (and version number) have you been using for your ssd tests?
Did you use default test options or did you manually change any test settings?

From the OP's added edit in post #14, physically removing the 2nd SLI card didn't help the SSD benchmark score.

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

I'd try clearing CMOS while the 2nd card out and load optimized defaults again.
Which slot is the remaining card in, PCIEX16 or PCIEX8?

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Also try to force "Turbo SATA3 / USB3.0 (Marvell 9128 /NEC USB 3.0 Controller)" to "Turbo SATA3"

[Ozark_750]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

I followed Prof Jim's advice and ran back to the way things were... and the speed is back up - not quite as fast as it was, but in the upper 390's. I went back to the original 4gb ram and pulled the 2nd card. The original ram was also g.skill but cas7, and the 8gb kit I bought is cas 9 - but I couldn't plug it all in together and boot, so I pulled the cas 7. I will do some more testing and see what busts the speed down. I'm keeping better notes this time

[Ozark_750]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Confirmed - give Chike the banana! SLI kills SATA3 on the gigabyte p55a-ud4p rev.1 board. BTW - when playing around with all this and rebooting the computer the marvel storage driver went away but atto results were a little bit slower than not having the marvell in there in the first place.

Uh... well... gee... who would ever use SATA 3 and SLI - what a schmuck?? Wow, how short yellow bus is that (ha - pun inteneded). Question is - is this a design fault or something in BIOS that might be able to be corrected? Oh, and I'm deeming it a fault.

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

I was looking at the specs of rev. 2 actually, you are not alone.
I looked at ASUS site and most their boards don't even have SATA3, the one that I saw that have them also has 5 PCIe x16 slots, god knows where they take all the bandwidth from.

The fault in the design is to have SATA3 to begin with, the chipset simply cannot handle all this bandwidth.
Maybe if they gave up the 3 PCIe x1 slots and the JMB chip they could have the marvel on PCIe x4, or another combination that will give it at least PCIe x2, from what I understand this chip cannot handle RAID0 SSD configuration very well.

[wazza300]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

you wont get any limitation on x58 and xfire/sli and usb3/sata3, but you will only see true sata3 speeds plus xfire/sli with 2cards @16x or 3 cards @16x-16x-8x on the newer p67/z68 and x79 mb's

[Ozark_750]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

So is this with all p55 / 1156 boards? I tried searching on newegg and they didn't have any 1156 bords listed with SLI and SATA3. I rekin' it's time to have a coke and a smile Really, for a cheap upgrade in video card running SLI on the gtx 460 probably breathes a breath of fresh breath into a copule year old board that will probably extend the life another year or so before needing to upgrade. Actually - reading a review of the board on http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.c...id=2495&page=2 where the reviewer writes:

There have been questions about the best way to connect SATA III devices to the rest of the computer. ASUS notably took the path of selecting a PLX bridge chip which adds additional PCI Express bandwidth between the Marvell SE9128 controller and P55 chipset so there is no chance of bottlenecks. Gigabyte have the Marvell SE9128 controller connected directly to the Intel P55 Express chipset. In single videocard configurations there is enough PCI Express bandwidth to go around, but apparently under SLI/Crossfire PCI Express lanes can become constrained.

So - does that mean that the asus boards that utilize the PLX bridge won't drop out of sata3 when using sli?

[profJim]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Maybe the best compromise is to connect your ssd to a sata2 port and see how it performs with your SLI setup.
I think that your sata3 ssd would perform about the same as my Agility2 sata2 ssd.
I don't know how well the Asus PLX bridge chip and sata3 works.

[Ozark_750]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

Maybe the best compromise is to connect your ssd to a sata2 port and see how it performs with your SLI setup.

You're right - just about the same performance as yours! Much better than the marvell. My guess is the SLI knocks the sata3 to sata1, not sata2. My read speed went to the 280's from 208 switching from the marvell to the intel pch (I think it's termed chipset on the manual so I think that's called the pch standard sata2 ports). To summarize, if you're using the gigabyte p55a-ud4p with SLI and a sata3 drive, switch off of the sata3 port to the sata2 port!

PS Prof Jim - do they still have the Aroma of Tacoma?? I grew up in the PNW and now live in the heartland, but I can still smell the pulp mills..

PPS - is anyone aware of any p55 boards that have sata3 that stays sata3 when using SLI?

[profJim]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

The Aroma of Tacoma is pretty much history
When there is a temperature inversion and no wind for several days, we sometimes get a fond gentle reminder.

Maybe you could set up a raid 0. I think the results even with sata2 limits would be quite good.
Instead of buying another P55 mobo, you could wait for several months for Ivy Bridge and the new Z77 mobos to come out. Then you'll be ready for PCI-E 3.0 SLI video cards when they eventually hit the market.

I won't upgrade my good ol' P35 system until I can get native Intel sata3 support along with native USB 3.0 etc.
Glad to hear that your ssd is feeling better.

[Chike]

Re: What did I mess up with my Marvell 9128 driver??

P7P55D-E boards PRO and up claim for "True USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s Support", better make sure before you buy.