Do these MB's have native sata support?

[Muscles]

Do these MB's have native sata support? What is the easiest way to tell if it does or doesn't?

DFI "LANPARTY UT nF3 250Gb" NVIDIA nForce3 250GB Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 754 CPU

GIGABYTE "GA-K8NS PRO" nForce3 250 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket 754 CPU

MSI "K8T Neo-FIS2R" K8T800 Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket 754

SOLTEK "SL-K8AN2E-GR" NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb Chipset Motherboard For AMD Socket 754

All these motherboards are similarly priced from good manufacturers. Building a few new workstations at my insurance office soon and I don't want to buy floppies for any of them 😛

 

[Insane3D]

They all have both native and non-native ports.

• The DFI has a pair of native SATA ports via the NF3 chipset, and two non-native from the Marvell PHY.
  
  
• The Gigabyte has two native from the NF3, and two PCI based from a integrated Silicon Image chip.
  
  
• The MSI has two native ports from the 8237 SB, and two non-native from the integrated Promise chip.
  
  
• The Soltek has a pair of native ones, and a pair of non native via a Promise chip.

🙂

I would go with the Soltek or the DFI for a office build...

🙂

Even if you used the non native ports, you could easily make a slipstreamed XP CD with the integrated controller's drivers.

 

[Muscles]

Thanks for the reply Insane3D.

I already built one of the new systems using the MSI board I listed which works great but I didn't use the sata ports on it, only have an IDE hd and dvd-r in it. It seems like a really solid board, very stable and fast. For home awhile ago I built an a64 system identical to the ones I'm building for the office workstations but with an Epox 8KDA3J and I had tons of problems because it didnt like the memory I used (1 stick of adata pc3200 512mb). Still upset about that so I'll never go with epox again at least for a very long time.

One more quick question regarding the sata ports. Are the native ones better/faster than the non-native on those boards? or vice versa? or does it make no difference. Just curious.

Thanks again

 

[Insane3D]

In theory the native SATA should be faster than a PCI controller. However, any differences will be so slight you willl never notice except in synthetic benchmarks. See, SATA-150 can theoretically use more bandwith than the PCI bus can provide, but there really aren't any SATA HD's that get anywhere near saturating the PCI bus. The native ports are more beneficial by taking HD's off of the PCI bus, and mapping it to the chipsets HS interconnect, V-Link or Hyper Transport, leaving more PCI bandwidth for other devices.

🙂