Onboard sil3114 on nForce4 boards and PCI bandwidth?

[davidj6]

Hello,

I am buildling a large RAID system and I'm considering a nForce4 motherboard with an additional 4 Serial ATA ports via a Sil 3114 chip. Will this chip operate at 33MHz or 66MHz (266MB/sec)? Operating at 33 MHz would impede performance at 133MB/sec. Also, will the chip's bandwidth be shared with regular PCI cards?

(also, do PCI cards still share bandwidth on the nForce4 motherboards?)

 

[Heidfirst]

the 3114 was quite a slow controller & yes it will share bandwidth with anything else using the PCI bus.
You should be able to get a PCI-E RAID card these days.

 

[tcsenter]

sil3114 is designed for 66MHz PCI bus (266MB/s @ 32-bit) but supports 33MHz bus just as well. So yes, the chip does support 66MHz PCI. Whether the motherboard in question implements the 66MHz bus for sil3114, the manufacturer can answer.

 

[Peter]

It for sure doesn't - simply because the chipset doesn't offer it.

This limits any storage controller to ~95MB/s actual throughput (133 MB/s is the /raw/ PCI bandwidth), even if there is no other traffic on the PCI bus.