Author: mchrist152
Subject: Z170 Extreme7+ Problems
Posted: 19 Dec 2016 at 2:05am
I just wanted to give an update. I returned the board and ASRock promptly sent me a replacement. In the meantime, I reinstalled my old ASUS board and upgraded the OS to windows 10. I also installed every driver for that board from ASRock's download page. Then I installed the replacement board and everything went pretty smoothly. The biggest problem I had was setting up the RAID system. I believe this is mostly due to the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software and drivers.
Subject: Z170 Extreme7+ Problems
Posted: 19 Dec 2016 at 2:05am
I just wanted to give an update. I returned the board and ASRock promptly sent me a replacement. In the meantime, I reinstalled my old ASUS board and upgraded the OS to windows 10. I also installed every driver for that board from ASRock's download page. Then I installed the replacement board and everything went pretty smoothly. The biggest problem I had was setting up the RAID system. I believe this is mostly due to the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software and drivers.
I installed the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software from the ASRock webpage but when I turned on RAID in the bios, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software would suffer an unknown error and not start. The Rapid Storage Technology service would not start automatically either. After much soul searching, google searching and pulling out hair I started to suspect drivers. But when I looked in device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, the version of the Intel driver was the latest. However, when I turned on RAID in the bios this driver would move from IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers to Storage controllers and then the version of that driver - iastorav.sys - was old (9.something). So I uninstalled that driver making sure to check the checkbox about removing it from the system and then the system found and installed another driver - iaStorAV.sys version 13.2.0.1022. This still seems old since I'm using version 14 of Intel's RST but things are working well so I decided to leave it alone.
I guess the main takeaway here is that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers do not update properly and it's a little tricky to detect given the way the device class and driver version changes once raid is enabled in the bios.
But I'm pretty positive on this board so far. We will see how it lasts over time.
