Which MSI Boards support Dual-Processors and IDE RAID?

[rhydewithdis]

Hello All. I'm bulding a new box and wanted to know which MSI Motherboards will support Dual AMD Processors and IDE RAID(1 or 5) for 3 drives, possibly even 4? My budget is decent and I was thinking of Dual-AMD XP 1800+ or 1900+ processors. I wanted to use a 30GB drive for my OS (winXP) and then 3 80GB or 100GB drives for the IDE RAID. Cases, Power Supplies, fans, and all other recommendations would also be a big help.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

I hate to say this, but there is only one MSI dual-AMD board available, (yes, there are two different revisions, before I get attacked by pedants) the MSI K7D Master. It doesnt have onboard RAID. The only Dual-AMD motherboard with build in RAID is the Gigabyte GA-7DPDW and that only supports RAID 1,0 and 1+0.

The only way to get IDE Raid 5 is to use a rather hefty PCI card which will cost a little over $150 (I can't remember which models do RAID 5, but Promise definitely have a board.)

You're better off getting two 120 or 160 gig drives and using RAID 1 if you're worried about data integrity.

Also, I'd check out the 2CPU.com forums, there have been a number of cases where newer XP chips havnt worked in SMP configurations.

Are you sure that a dual CPU box is the best option for your budget?

 

[rhydewithdis]

Well what i was thinking was that the amount of money I would spend on a top of the line processor ($250+) I could instead get two slightly slower processers with a significantly greater combined speed for about the same price... but it doesn't seem to look that way what with my limitations in options I now see. So some might ask why do I have a need for this - I really don't but I just wanted the best bang for my buck (budget of about $1200 for mobo, case, cpu, power supply, fan, NIC, sound board, CDR-W/DVD-RW - I already have the monitor, keyboard, mouse).

So with the current mobo's, I know they support the latest cpu's but a year or two from now will the support whatever is out at that time (ie. popping out the old cpu and putting a new one in)?

RAID 5 doesn't look that appealing then either if it's going to cost a bunch to do it. I think it would be better if I just purchased a DVD-RW drive instead and went with a mirroring (RAID 1) solution... any ideas on how would a RAID 0+1 solution benefit (or not) me if I used two 120GB drives?

EDIT: I just realized that 0+1 RAID is basically TWO (RAID 1) mirror sets that are using RAID 0 to stripe the data.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

You don't want to be doing duallie on a budget of $1200. The motherboard is at least twice the price, and you should be using registered ram which is more expensive. Go for a recent motherboard any equip it with PC2700. A KT333 or KT400 motherboard will be probably be okay for any future AMD CPUs (such as the Thoroughbred B and Barton cores) and run everything around today very fast. The Western Digital special edition drives (with 8MB cache) are very fast. I would recommend that you install windows on one of those drivers rather than an older and slower 30Gig drive. It's probably worth going for a single 120Gig drive if you want to fit a DVD-RW in your budget.
Go for an appropriately sized antec or cheiftec case. Get the retail CPU so you get a heatsink. A GeForce 4 Ti-4200 will do video very nicely. The onboard sound on many of today's KT333 motherboards will probably be fine for you. Any NIC will do unless you're building a server. You should be able to pick one up for under $10.