Abit AW8 / Pentium D and 3ware raid cards compatibility

[Gerald de la Pascua]

I posted a few weeks back regarding problems making the aw8 board,
work with a 3ware card 7006-2,
 the system wouldn't boot at all,
 after much discussion with 3ware they said, sorry nothing we can do,
cannot offer an alternative suggested card, so I was about to change the
mother board, infact 3ware were unaware of any motherboard which worked
with their cards, which also worked with a pentiumD chip, which to be honest
I wasn't very impressed with since pentiumD isn't that exotic technology.
 however ABIT have now issued 1.3 bios for the motherboard, (I had looked on

the site an installed 1.2 already ), With this it works fine,
 the only issue I had were some acpi errors, so I disabled acpi,
since it is a server this doesn't seem to be too much of an issue to me,
 the machine seems to run significantly faster than the old
pentium2.8single core,
it is difficult to asses the value for money of the machine, although the
pentiumD
is a similar price to the normal pentiums, the mother boards are
significantly more
expensive, however if you just want good performance and you don't mind
spending
a hundred pounds or so more, I would say its definitely worth it,
 I hope this is of some help to other users, if you would like clarification
on anything,
I am happy to give more info,
 kind regards,
 Gerald