buying new rig soon, need mother board advice!

[nclark42]

Hey you guys--

I've never really posted here before, just ghosted. I am going to buy a new computer this week, and I wanted to get advice on the motherboard to buy. I am going with P4 2.66GHz, "Northwood 512K Socket 478" whatever that means, unless someone has a good reason why I should not! Here is a list of features I'd like to have on the motherboard.

1. EIDE up to ATA133, and Native Serial ATA

1. Native RAID support. Regarding this one, I saw chizow mention that onboard RAID controllers usually do RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. What is 0+1? I want the RAID where its faster, and does _some_ (not the maximum) parity. I thought this was RAID 5, but I guess there are no onboard RAID controllers that do that... or are there? Also, I'd like to be able to put the SATA or EIDE drives in a RAID, but if I had to choose, I would want to put the EIDE drives in it

1. Are there p4 motherboard chipsets that can use faster than DDR333? If there are, I would like this on the board, too.

1. Standard stuff: 2 USB 2.0 sockets, AGP 4x (at least), and 5 or more PCI slots...

Can anyone think of a board with these features?

Thank you my homeboys.
-Neal

 

[Zepper]

Consider waiting for the SiS 655 based mobos to get to the States - shouldn't be long. Check out OCWorkbench for specs and previews.
.bh.


Oops, apparently some are here already. Gigabyte at newegg.bh.

 

[Maki]

For the cost of sata to ide adapters you might consider just buying a PCI card to do your raid. And considering the fact that my system is running faster with the SIS648 IDE controller (not raided) than it was with the built in Raid of my last abit I'm not sure Raid is even worthwhile.

Raid 0+1 is just what it sounds like - raid 0 (striping) with raid 1 (mirroring). Striping across two drives with two additional drives mirroring that. You'll need 4 drives to do it tho. Two are mirrors of the other two.

Raid 5 sucks if you want performance. Reading is fine. Writing takes something like 2 reads and 2 writes. (Original data, original parity, new data and new parity.) No matter how you slice it that just isn't as fast as two writes in parallel. (For Raid 0+1. It is one write for Raid 0 alone.)

As to the board you are looking for you'll probably want the Gigabyte SIS655 based one. The one with regular ide raid AND SATA raid. (Plus two other IDE connectors.) A very feature filled board. If it would have been in stock I would have bought one. Instead I went cheap and added a PCI IDE controller.