RAID Woes

My RAID controller arrived yesterday to much excitement on my part. I unboxed it immediately and was very happy with what I saw. I had already placed the order for my new case and hard drives, and they were ready to be picked up, so I paid for them and giggled a little inside!!

My mate (who has a server similar to mine, except with 500GB Hitachi drives) is going to help me build my server. He's the kind of guy who tidies everything up very well, so I figured his expertise would come in very handy, and I was pretty impressed with the end result. The cables look great!

However, my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI) will NOT detect my RAID card at all. The BIOS doesn't see it, and my OS doesn't see it. I've used this motherboard for SLI with 2x nVidia 7800GT's and they worked OK, so I am pretty sure the second PCI-Express (x16) port works...

We took the RAID card to my mate's place and plugged it in to his server, and the BIOS immediately picked it up fine, so I don't think the card is DOA... (Which is lucky, as I imported it from the US to Australia, and I'd hate to have all these HDDs just sitting here while I sent the card back to be replaced!).

I've ordered a new Motherboard, CPU and RAM from IJK:

1 x AMD HDZ965FBGMBOX 965 Phenom II X4, 3.4GHz, Quad Core , 8MB cache, 125W AM3 black edition $223.00

2 x Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 4GB (2x XMS3 2GB) PC-12800 (1600MHz) XMS KIT, DDR3 For MB i7 / i5 Core dual channel DDR3 processors $350.00

1 x Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 AM3, AMD790X, 4DDR3, 2PCIE2.0, RAID, GbLAN, 3FW, SATA3, USB3, ATX $187.00

Coming to $760 all up, it should bring my computer back in to this century.

I am about to hop in the car, drive to the office, and test this RAID card in my work computer. I want to know that the newer model gigabyte motherboard will detect my RAID card before I commit another ~$800 to this computer... $800 I technically don't have! :(

Photos of the build soon.