motherboard recommendations

[quietfly]

I have to replace a mobo that died on me. I have a msi p6n 680i based board that crapped the bed. I need to replace it with a board that can handle
1. Four WD500YS drives in a raid 5 or better configuration.
2. One WD wd1500adfd as the boot drive
3. E6420 c2d mildly over clocked
4. 4870 card
5. two sets gskilll f2-6400phu2 (4gb total)
6. Tuniq Tower120


This machine will mostly be used for as a media server, watching movies on my tv (55 sony) ,and playing LoTRO and MS Flight SIM X . i'bb be using the hdmi out from the 4870 to go to my receiver which also does the hdmi switching.

Really stable raid performance is important to me. The 680i?s raid was crappy and I never want to experience that again ?
I?m also thinking about up grading the proc to either a 6600 or a 9550, but that most likely will not come until after April unless I find a firesale somewhere.

I?ll be running vista ultimate 64

I?ve been an MSI fan , but they?ve really disappointed me with this last board, I?m willing to look at anything else.

Thanks for the suggestions

-Chris

 

[Concillian]

Strong RAID performance is important, but you're planning on using on-board RAID?

This sounds like a big issue. On-board RAID tends to be kind of a checkbox feature where the MFR wants to get it on their spec sheet as cheaply as possible.

If RAID is important, go with an aftermarket card. Especially RAID 5, software RAID 5 will write slow no matter what. for a 4 port actual hardware RAID controller that will provide decent performance you pretty much have to expect to pay $200-300. The cheap controllers will not have good RAID 5 performance due to the need for figuring parity for every bit. You need a hardware solution for parity calcs to be reasonably fast. Note that it's probably cheaper to use RAID 1 on a software controller than it is to buy a true hardware controller for RAID 5.

 

[quietfly]

I suppose i should clarify that and say that i just want better performance than the nvidia nforce raid that was on my now deceased 680i board. my issue was not with performance but rather data corruption which i later found out was common for that chipset. I have a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML on my current desktop, so i know how expensive it can be for a good hardware solution. I've hear that the intel ich9r and 10r chips are pretty reliable right now? is that not the case?

 

[brainwave]

You might look at the Gigabyte EP45-UD3R. It has 2 RAID controllers on-board. One is intel ICH10R, and the other they call "Gigabyte RAID" but it is another RAID controller. There are a total of 8 SATA, so you could have one RAID setup for your boot drive, and another in redundancy for data drives. The P45 chipset has been extremely stable. Read reviews on this board on this forum and you will find very positive comments for a very reasonably priced good quality mb.

 

[OCNewbie]

The Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P is currently on sale through Newegg for $99 after rebate/coupon code - Link

 

[axion]

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P is what I would go for as well, just about to order one myself!