k first off the DS3 doesnt use an Intel ICH8 chipset for sata so put that out of your mind. I know the gigabyte site says its ICH8 but thats their stupid error. its not ICH8 its the JMicron. thats why its so cheap. if they had gone with the Intel sata controller it would have added a nice chunck to the cost of the board.

ok...

in the bios set the make sure you have things set properly. SATA controller enabled and set to RAID... NOT ahci.... and the raid drives on the purple ports only. the orange are sata the purple are raid. make sure your sata drives. all of them are set to the proper MASTER position with the jumper. PM1 PM2 and SSC (spread spectrum clocking) in the jumper of the hard drive has cause me issues before, if yourhard drive doesnt show the standard Primary Master posiiton then go to the website of who made it and find out. for raptors the master is the jumper all the way to the left. next go into windows and go into device manager and uninstall the primary ide controller, all of them and the secondary... and then reboot.
this will force windows to reinstall the drivers for them. If you installed the gigabyte jmicron drivers for the sata and ide, you never needed to. only for raid.... so you can uninstall those. or manually force the ide controller to use the standard IDE drivers. again all of the drives need to be master, unless your running an IDE cdrom and hard drive off the same cable. then which ever drive is on the end of the cable is master and the second is slave and you must set the jumpers to be that way.

give it a try

I'd assume for a single HDD user like myself, I won't face any issues with the DS3?

Also, I'm wondering, do any of you guys cool the MOSFETs? I'm particularly concerned about those because I've had a few P4P800s die on me ever since I switched to a Scythe Ninja and I have a sneaking suspicion it's due to MOSFET failure over time since the Ninja doesn't cool those at all.

anything over 800...then u can get a kvr...around 300 onli and can do 970...hehehhe...why pay more when u can get it for less

still can't get ur raid to work?

Not worth in my opinion.

somebody mentioned that there's a lot of Kingston DDR2-533 (1GB modules) using D9GCT at Lowyat, perhaps you might want to survey around. The Micron chips are easily to be identified as they're not relabelled.

i can help rlhc to answer it since i used biostar once as well..

1) the biostar has intel raid
2) the biostar is not worse overclocker then his ds3 (in my situation biostar oc better than my ds4, dq6 and even p5b deluxe! ..with ds3 i used e6400 so cant compare with the biostar)
3) the biostar has nice bundle, got power & reset button on the board

i'm not saying biostar is better than ds3 in every aspect.. if u compare side by side, u can see the biostar looks a bit cheapo, if u know what i mean.. maybe they use a cheaper pcb, capacitor or etc... i dunno but that is my impression towards the physical of the biostar.

in overclocking, i can safely say biostar is very good overclocking board for my E6600.. when others like ds4 and dq6 limit my oc to around 370fsb x9, the biostar easily did 392x9 and it is PI stable..

and it's not fair for me to compare with ds3 since i never try my e6600 on the ds3

I thought Tampoi is putting his up for sale?

LOL! We work until siao also can't afford E6600