AMD AHCI with W7 Question

[Ryhadar]

Just put together a new machine for a friend and I was wanted to test AMD's AHCI driver vs Microsoft's standard AHCI driver. I know AMD's AHCI support is broken but I was curious all the same (what can I say? I like to tinker). The funny thing is that whenever I try to install the AHCI drivers from AMD the Catalyst installer tells me there's nothing to install. After that I searched for the drivers in the extracted folder and found the msi for it. However when attempting to install them I get a prompt telling me that the configuration is incompatible. Also tried uninstalling the microsoft drivers first but still no go.

So I'm a little confused as to what's happening. I've installed AMD's AHCI drivers in XP but never in Vista/7. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? I'm thinking I need to set the SATA option in the BIOS to RAID to allow the install of the drivers but I have no desire to reinstall the operating system. Or maybe it's because the driver is really only for Vista?

Whatever the case don't spend too much time thinking about it; I know I won't. The chipset in question is the 785G/SB710. Thanks.

[Flying Fox]

So I'm a little confused as to what's happening. I've installed AMD's AHCI drivers in XP but never in Vista/7. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? I'm thinking I need to set the SATA option in the BIOS to RAID to allow the install of the drivers but I have no desire to reinstall the operating system. Or maybe it's because the driver is really only for Vista?

Whatever the case don't spend too much time thinking about it; I know I won't. The chipset in question is the 785G/SB710. Thanks.

Which board exactly? Do you have the SATA option set to AHCI?

[Ryhadar]

Yeah had AHCI enabled before I installed Windows 7. Don't think the exact board will matter but specifically it's this one here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

Just to be clear AHCI is enabled and working fine, but with the Microsoft Standard AHCI driver.

[Flying Fox]

Try "upgrading the drives" via Device Manager? Remember to back up your data if you need to.

This is interesting as I'm thinking about the US2H board myself.

[Ryhadar]

Great idea, yeah they installed that time. Forgot you could force the install that way, though admittedly I immediately thought of forcing it by manually adding them to the necessary directories. At that point though I just said to myself, "too much work" and moved on.

[Flying Fox]

Benchmark time?

[Ryhadar]

Well didn't do anything super intensive but the rundown was:

HDTACH:
AMD - Burst: 221.4 MB/S
Microsoft - Burst: 186.6MB/S

AMD - Average Read: 94.9 MB/S
Microsoft - Average Read: 95.1 MB/S

AMD - CPU: 4%
Microsoft - CPU: 4%

IOmeter 1 Outstanding I/O:

AMD - Total I/O per second: 159.29
Microsoft - Total I/O per second: 160.43

AMD - CPU: .47%
Microsoft - CPU: .46%


IOmeter 16 Outstanding I/O:

AMD - Total I/O per second: 213.31
Microsoft - Total I/O per second: 279.73

AMD - CPU: .38%
Microsoft - CPU: .72%

These numbers aren't comparable with TR's results, but I'd say I was surprised. I used the default Access Specifications for IOmeter in all tests. All in all, though I'm going to stick with the microsoft driver just because the CPU util is lower than I expected and the I/O per second are much better. I do wonder why the burst speed is better on AMD's drivers though (I ran the test multiple times and got the same results). Arguably it's not as important a statistic but it's still interesting.