Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0

[NeoGen]

Does anyone own one of these, or have read about it?

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SA...990FXGEN3_R20/

I have been doing some much needed upgrades to my main machine, only to find out that my 5+ year old AM3 motherboard seems to be incompatible with RAID controllers (Adaptec 6405E).
I've been holding off on upgrading the motherboard for a long time because AMD never released a chipset with PCIe 3.0 support (and I've been waiting for it), but I think it came to the point I can't hold off any more, I really want this RAID controller to work for me. So I found this one motherboard from ASUS claiming to be the only one in the world that actually has implemented PCIE 3.0 on a 990FX chipset. (I wonder how...?)

Anyway, this motherboard should even support the Phenom II X6 1100T that I currently have, so it would be wonderful (and one less expense not having to get a new CPU).

Does anyone else here have it, know it, or have opinions on it that you guys can share with me before I jump on it?

[Dirk Broer]

I don't think anyone has it yet, as the previous version -Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0- has only been available for a few months.
But I have read about it: It is indeed the first AMD Motherboard that will support PCIe 3.0, so the board to go for when you also plan to buy -or already own- a PCIe 3.0 card
By the way: beats me as to why the Adaptec 6405E won't be supported by your present board, and will it fit in the newest Sabertooth?
Guess you will have to stick it in the last PCIe 2.0 x16 slot then.
The three generations -note that the CeraM!x coating now also includes the 990FX chipset and the loss of the PCIe 1.0 port under another CeraM!x-like thingus, no doubt the reason for the PCIe 3.0-:

Asus Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0

Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

Asus Sabertooth 990FX

The matching -almost the same color as the TUF CeraM!x of at least the original Sabertooth- Corsair memory:

[Terry1953]

I have been looking at this board and really like the specs on it. I put it on my "Buy This" list as my next MoBO. I think it'll look real good with 16 gigs of that Corsair memory and a pair of 7790's. I still have an 8350 laying around here somewhere. But with summer coming I might make it a Labor Day project.

[NeoGen]

Dirk, the Adaptec 6405E does fit on my board (Gigabyte GA-MA790XT UD4P) but for some reason to whatever PCIE slot I plug it the boot error is always the same, it's something like "Adapter firmware is corrupted! You need to reflash the firmware on the card". I know this is not true because I take the exact same adapter, plug it to an older machine and it boots perfectly, detects hard drives and does everything. Using the Adaptec Firmware Utility it even verifies the firmware checksum to be correct but on my Gigabyte board it just refuses to work.

Upon looking around online I found a few threads of people with various RAID controllers having similar complains on several different Gigabyte motherboards, and some rumours say that the PCIE ports on this motherboard are somehow mainly dedicated to GPUs so their compatibility with other kinds of adapters is hit and miss. (It's hard to believe that but at this point I'm starting to almost believe it)
http://superuser.com/questions/25764...rom-any-drives
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/24...-compatibility


I tried all PCIE slots, tried enabling and disabling most of the boards features, tried upgrading the bios both on my motherboard to the latest version, and also the firmware of the RAID controller to 2 different versions but never got it to work right so I am giving up on it. I was wanting to upgrade anyway so this might be the sign that it's time to go ahead and do it.

I can't find anywhere to guarantee that it will work, but I have more faith on this Asus than on my Gigabyte, if nothing else just because mine is probably around 5yrs old already.

[Dirk Broer]

Hi NeoGen,

It take it that you have at least the F7 BIOS for your board?

F7 2009/11/20:

1. Add CPU Core Control option
2. update Raid\AHCI ROM

[AMDave]

@ NeoGen
http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/d...S0RrKipDbmw%3D
(although I think the idea that Firmware can somehow become corrupt is more than a bit dubious - it's FIRMware)

I was able to download the compatibility report
http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support...x5ecr_pdf.html

The interface is 6405E: 1-lane PCIe Gen2
There is a specific list of compatible host models.
Gigabyte is not among them.

One thing you may want to try is in BIOS completely disable the Mobo IDE + SATA interfaces via the BIOS, then reboot and see if the Adaptec takes primary controller position.
Also make sure (if present) PnP is disabled so BIOS takes some ownership of what goes where in RAM and what IRQs are assigned at boot instead of waiting for the OS to sort out - which it can't if there's a boot conflict.

I hope you get that card to work.
It's a nice piece of kit.

[NeoGen]

Dirk, I didn't try F7, Even before adding the Adaptec controller I already had F8, and then I also tried with F9b, which I had never upgraded to before because it was still marked as Beta, but even so it didn't work.

Dave, I did remember to try and disable both SATA controllers but it also didn't work. After reading your post today I went to the bios again to go over all the settings and once again disable both SATA controllers and disabled all 4 IDE ports manually. (Doesn't have a function to just disable IDE altogether)
There was no visible function to enable/disable PnP, so couldn't get that one. I've seen on other motherboards where it even has options to set each IRQ to what PCI port but this one doesn't come with that level of control. But even so with all IDE ports disabled plus both SATA controllers disabled, the only thing left in the boot options was "Optional boot-in cards" as number 1 (and only). Upon boot the same problem continued and skipping the Adaptec issue it ends up saying something like "No boot disks found" and stops, which I guess it means it couldn't recognize the Adaptec controller and all other options were disabled.

The firmware has to be fine, I have flashed it two or three times on my other older computer and it works great, flashes without a problem and even verifies checksum to be correct. On my computer however none of those operations is possible. Even if trying to ignore the issue and booting windows from one of the motherboard's SATA ports, windows detects a "RAID controller" (no specific model) and when I install the drivers it just freezes and I have to do a reset.
I mostly ignore the compatibility reports on computer parts because I know there is no way they can test against every single device out there, so they only have a couple dozen devices that they tested for and don't bother with the rest. Usually the ones they tested don't really meet my personal requirements. Like motherboards that have 512Mb RAM chips on their compatibility lists... who uses that these days?

[Dirk Broer]

Gigabyte seems pretty confident you use either the AMD SB750 or Gigabyte's own onboard SATA controller chip for RAID (Manual: pages 26/27, 47/48 and 73/94 -English version, you might have the Portuguese version). Not a word about external RAID controllers...
Unlike the new Sabertooth, pages 5-8/5-9 mention third-party RAID controller.

[NeoGen]

Yea... as much as I like the FakeRAIDs that come on every motherboard these days, this time I would like to have a real hardware based RAID adapter because I intend to do an SSD array, and I don't want it to choke or use up my CPU too much if I push it to the limits

[NeoGen]

Well guys... after much debating with myself over these last few days I ended up last night taking the plunge and ordered it!

If all goes well and shipping doesn't take too long I am hoping to receive it by the end of the week, so that I have all weekend to play with it.
I will try to remember to take some pics for you guys to see, and get some benchmarks on it with my X6 1100T.
I hope AMD sticks with AM3+ a few more years for me to at least be able to upgrade the CPU at some point in the future, right now the highest CPU I see on the compatibility list is the 8-core FX-8350. Hopefully they will continue to develop AM3+ compatible processors that will be compatible with this board... maybe 12 or 16 cores?