I am putting my new PC together right now (Gigabyte GA-P67-UD7, i7 2600k CPU) I am wondering why I have no SATA 3 cables, Gigabyte supply only 4 standard cables. Is there a difference between them? I ask because I also have 2 SATA 3 hard drives, one being the Crucial 256GB SSD. Do I need a SATA 3 cable to get the most from it? Right, a ‘mini-rant’, I am not over impressed with the Corsair 600T case, well, not so much the case, but the lack of literature, and the lack of a system speaker! Obviously, I can guess what most of the wires/connectors are for, but some, which seem to be fan headers, have me stumped! (The fans already have their own connectors!) All you get is one A3 size multi-lingual sheet, showing an exploded view of the case with a brief description of the numbered areas, and that’s it! I have had better from cases costing half as much – complete with speaker. Corsair has supplied rubber grommets for the case fans, but oddly, none for the HDD trays. I like the idea of tool less solutions, but I just know that, because the fit of the standard hard drives is a little loose, they will vibrate and make noise. With hindsight, I should have gone for a Lian-Li. I plan to just connect the SSD at first, so there’s no confusion when installing the OS – what is the most important thing I need to check in the BIOS when I first boot up? (Sorry for the simplistic nature of the questions, but I am 2 generations behind when it comes to hardware)!
Haven't seen that board yet, but some of the P67 boards have AHCI as a default. Anyway, first thing to check is that your BIOS is set to AHCI, this will be in "Storage Configuration" or something similar.
Other than the recommendation by the official sata org not to use cheap (esp longer) SATA cables for 6Gb/s d.t. signal attenuation -> lower speeds, there's no difference at all between the cables themselves. As Gigabyte supplied them, i'd be very surprised if they weren't up to spec. Tbh, (again other than very cheap cables) it's just a way for cable companies & retailers to charge extra by unnecessarily worrying people.
Thank you for that, it's nice to know that there's no real difference between the SATA 2 and 3 cables - I'll use what the motherboard came supplied with, then. That Gigabyte mobo is a thing of beauty! ...And another slight nitpick with the case - the USB 3 cable, which is connected to the front USB 3 port, is supplied with a standard USB 3 plug, instead of a motherboard header, This would be fine if the cable were long enough for it to route around the back of the case and come out of one of the water cooler grommets at the back, to be plugged into the mobo I/O panel - but it's not! I looked on the SCAN website to see if there were any headers for this, and there are none.
OK, have now set up my new PC, no real problems and all works fine. However, I have the Crucial C300 SSD as the main OS drive. I enabled AHCI in the BIOS, but when I ran a system performance check in Windows7, the CPU gets 7.6 (not overclocked yet), memory gets 7.6, grahics is 7.9 (GTX580), but primary hard disk only gets 5.9! Why is this, do I need to change a setting somewhere? Cheers, Chris
Windows Experience results are a little random at the best of times... you might find it corrects itself after a short period of operation. What is you drive configuration in terms of other HDD? And does the system boot time seem quick?
I have a Samsung 2TB HDD and a Seagate 2TB HDD (SATA3) - but I thought it tested the primary hard disk only, which is the 256GB SSD,. System boot times seem to be no better than standard mechanical hard drives! I have managed to overclock the CPU to 4.5GHz, though...
Just took some quick pics. All fit in the case fine, and the temps have been fine too. All three hard drives (including the SSD are in the bottom rack - I took the top HDD rack out, for better airflow for the GPU;
