Planning system overhauls

[HexiumVII]

I'm planning on overhauling my gaming/photoshop rig and my filesever. I'm looking for a matched pair of motherboards, which will make things easier for somethings i do.

My server is on 24/7 so i want as low power as possible with the lowest power PCIe graphics card (sometimes i have friends over that play Wacraft III, but any PCIe should handle that). I'll be setting up a RAID5 with 4x 500GB hard drives. I'm planning to use SATA Raid from either Nvidias Raid or Intels Matrix Raid. I hear nvidias always have some sort of issue, don't know if they fixed it yet or knew ones cropped up for the 6XXi series.

I want my gaming rig to be fastest of coarse. I'm boycotting SLi/Crossfire so i'll never use 2 video cards. Probably going with 4MB Core 2, 2Gig ram, will be running my SCSI hard drives with LSI regular PCI controller and SB Audigy. Also will be running 2x 250GB Raid 1 mirror. Vid card will prob be 8800GTS.

Any comments appreciated!

 

[moosey]

If you need it now, I'd look to intel b/c of the nvidia issues. If you can wait to see if the 650i has issues like the 680i, then you may be able to make a better comparison. I'd hold off on nvidia until they find out what's exactly wrong though. http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI0NCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

 

[Tyhr]

Intel is what it sounds like you want.
1. lower power consumption
2. SATA RAID (read many bad things about 680i's SATA, and a lot more when they are/were in a RAID).
3. overall more stable