A little 8KNXP help please!

I recently acquired this board (Bios F5, board revision 1.0) and it's great except for a few small issues. If anyone can lend a hand please do so. I have 3 main issues:
1) The first issue is with my northbridge fan, it does not spin while in Windows, but does during the boot sequence. How important is it to have this fan? Is it worth it to just purchase a silent solution from Zalman?


2) My 2nd issue is with the game port. While my package was generous it did not include a game port, so I got my friends from his A7N8X board, installed it correctly using the alligning pin, plugged in a working Microsoft joystick, enabled the port in the bios, but Windows XP still will not recognize there as being any such joystick being connected. In the Bios there are the options of "disable", "201", and "209". I've tried both 201 and 209 with no success. Do I need to enable the Midi port? and if so should it be set at "330" or "300"? I don't even know what the last option is for, it's for a CIR port, It's currently disabled and can be set to either "310" or "320", do I need to do anything with that?


3) The last item I would like help with is booting to my Serial ATA drive. The situation is such that I have 2 CD drives occupying IDE2 port, I have an IDE hard drive, and a Serial ATA hard drive. I would like to know if it's possible to boot from the S-ATA drive, and retain functionality on both CD drives and the IDE hard drive, I downloaded the patch from Gigabyte "driver_chipset_intel_ich5r_raidboot.exe" and updated the RAID driver but it did not cure the problem


I know it's asking for a lot, but any help with any of the subjects is greatly appreciated

Think i can help yoy maybee with point 2.
Older MS joysticks have problems beeing detected in newer OS as XP, even documented on MS homepage.
i have a old MS Sidewinder 3D Pro its there but it says not connected. thoe i can use it as a ordinary two axis joystick.

I e-mailed Gigabyte last night too, they replied back today which was a VERY good turn-around time, here is what they had to say:

"
Hi,

1) The chipset fan is controlled by the "SMART FAN" in the EasyTune 4
program. Pls check the setting for the "smart fan" to see if the "time
switch" is on and the schedule is right.
2) The game port might require the special game port cable to connect to
the M/B. We are testing the cable now and still wait for the result.
3) If you are using the ICH5 SATA port, it's the only way to do it which
you need to map to the IDE1. Pls try to use the Silicon Image SATA port
for the SATA HDD. You should be able to do it.
Tks.


Gigabyte E Service
"

You can boot from the SATA drive off of the ICHR5 controller (thereby retaining your four IDE channels), but you'll need to flash the BIOS with one of the beta F6 updates (I'm using F6b, but I think F6e is out now).

Refer to this thread for more info:

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=209081