Using SATA on P5Q Pro = Corruption...why?

For some reason if I have Storage set to detect as "AHCI" to use SATA, it makes games unplayable... like I would load a game and within a few minutes it freezes, then artifacts, or sometimes if loading a new scene/voiceover it errors out to desktop. It seems like the data gets corrupted when it's loading something. When I turn off SATA by making it detect as "IDE" then the issue is gone.

Is there some other settings in the BIOS I need to change in order for SATA to work properly? The games hard drive is a 750GB SATAII Seagate and CPU is e8400 mildly OC'd to 3.6 @ 1.225v. Do I need to give more voltage to the SB or something? I've never touched that setting because I'm not sure what the default SB voltage is, how much to increase it, nor ever heard of anyone needing to up the SB for OC'ing (only the NB). But I'm guessing the corruption is caused by an unstable SB since that's what controls SATA.

So far I haven't been seriously able to OC my CPU, trying to deal with a million issues at once before going for 4ghz+.

I also get a BSOD when trying to install XP Pro with the drives set to AHCI, and I also have a P5Q Pro.

Ok, maybe I know why... after testing many diff. settings, I think the IDE controller (Marvel IDE or whatever) conflicts with the SATA controller, so I can't run both on this board. If I turn off the IDE controller then it won't boot windows since my OS hard drive is IDE, so I'll have to keep the 'configure SATA' option set to 'IDE', then there are no conflicts. I don't notice any difference in speed anyway, since I don't use a raptor or raid... so keeping SATA off is fine for now.

While experimenting though I found something very strange. Using either CoreTemp, RealTemp or Speedfan while running a game causes freeze and artifacts too. This is a seperate issue since it happens regardless of IDE or SATA mode. And SATA mode still freezes/artifacts regardless of running any of those utilities or not. But as long as I don't run any temp monitoring software that monitors my CPU temps, and run in IDE mode, it's 100% stable. Running EVGA Precision to monitor my GPU temps still works. I don't get it.

What bios version do you have?

I know that when you install Windows under IDE mode with a SATA drive, changing it to ACHI will cause Windows to stop booting and BSOD, but not during gaming. Have you tried having your SATA drive under ACHI with no overclock?

@Ghost_recon: Have your chosen to load SATA drivers from a floppy during install? I know the XP set up wont see the drives when they're under ACHI mode.

I'm on 1306 bios and installed windowsxp on an IDE drive... after that installed the intel inf updater and then intel matrix storage manager. Just noticed that they released 1406 recently, except the description shows almost no change from 1306. Wish they'd actually list all the fixes and stuff.

For ghost_recon; you would need to download and put the Intel Matrix Storage Manager on a floppy so you can F6 install it on the windowsxp CD startup screen (when it says press F6 to install third party scsi/raid driver or whatever), then proceed with the normal windows install, and AHCI will work without BSOD after that.

i run 1306 on the same board, i run both sata and ide no problems.