IGP Update - Intel DG45ID vs Sony BDU-X10S

Anand and I have been doing regression testing almost non-stop for the past 48 hours with the recently released Intel G45 15.11.2.1554 driver set for Vista 32 and BIOS version 079.  We might add that in Intel's infinite wisdom they generally update the 4-series chipset support page a few days before the actual DG45ID support page that was still listing the 1545 driver set as of tonight (page was updated today with the latest driver set).

This particular driver and BIOS combination along with the recently updated versions of Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray and Arcsoft TMT v125 were suppose to address/improver repeater support among other changes.  One of the major updates I have been testing is updated EDID information in the latest drivers for several of our HDMI monitors that were having problems ranging from lack of proper resolution recognition to scaling deficiencies. It appears several of our monitors now work properly and we were having great success with repeater support until things began to unravel earlier today.  We also noted that deinterlacing is working correctly now.

However, the dreaded HDMI audio out 2-channel only support (G45 supports up to 8-channel out) reared its ugly head again as did the lack of repeater support on one of our main HT configurations after a simple reboot.  Both problems seem to come and go on this board at will as well as several others that we will discuss shortly.  We are still working through these particular problems and should have an answer early tomorrow.  If not, our first IGP article (three total) featuring the G45 chipset will go up as is within the next 24 hours or so (9/23 PM update - Intel is trying to resolve several problems tonight, 9/24 update - Intel has a few answers for us, article up later today).

Another major problem that we have had on this board is compatibility with various SATA based BD capable optical drives.  In every case, our Intel DG45ID boards have not properly recognized the Sony BDU-X10S.  Granted we have had some problems with our ASUS and LITE-ON drives on this board but those have been random.   This board absolutely does not like this particular Sony drive.  In each case, we updated the board to BIOS 079 and the Sony drive to firmware version 1.0d .  Depending on whether we have AHCI or RAID enabled on the board, the drive needs to be attached to SATA port 3 to ensure the system will POST properly.  If we select Native IDE, the drive refuses to work properly when attached to any port with our component selections. This drive works perfectly on the ASUS and Gigabyte G45 boards without a firmware update so we think the incompatibility is with the Intel BIOS. 

We also have an LG GGC-H20L Optical drive and a Western Digital SE16 640GB HD attached to SATA ports two and one respectively.  I have been testing other combinations since last week on this board and have run into an issue where I cannot get the Intel board to properly recognize the Sony drive with our WD eSATA based drive or with a Hitachi 1TB drive installed as the main OS drive.  Our choice of port assignments do not make a difference in these two cases.  Hopefully we will have a solution for this problem shortly.

We have not encountered any repeatable S3 resume problems with our Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H board.  We did have one particular configuration that would sometimes require a full POST but that was solved by Gigabyte with a new Beta BIOS that also offers additional processor support and improved memory performance in our testing to date.  This BIOS is not supported and use at your own risk but we determined it stable enough to utilize in our roundup.  You can download F3F here.