Performance of Raid controller card vs embedded to MB

[jbadley22]

Does anyone know if there is a difference in performance between buying a controller card and having the raid embedded into my motherboard? I would think that if the raid was directly connected to the south bridge it would be faster than going through the pci bus at 33 mhz.

What i really want is an n-force2 board with easy over clocking and raid embedded but i can't find one.

Thanks

 

[Lord Evermore]

Integrated RAID controllers on a motherboard do utilize the PCI bus, because they are not integrated into the chipset. They are simply wired directly into the bus, with the same connectors that would be used for a PCI slot card. So the performance is no different.

Only Intel's ICH5R so far has integrated RAID capability which is independent of the PCI bus, and it only works on the SATA ports (which is kind of odd since the RAID function according to their diagram is NOT actually part of the SATA controller).