Any suggestions for ASUS motherboard

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ASUS User

I am looking for the following - any suggestions

ASUS Board
SATA Raid 5 capable
AGP
AMD Chipset - latest chipset

Not sure if I should go with 64 chipset... dont you need a diff
operating system or will they run 32 bit apps and OS?

Thanks
JD
 
In reverse order:

The 64 bit Athlons run well under ordinary 32 bit Windows XP. XP Home
Edition will support a dual core A64 X2. (I'm writing this from such a
machine.) I downloaded the XP64 demo version, but I haven't bothered
installing it. I don't need the large address space (for more than 4 GB RAM
or virtual memory), and some of my hardware has no available XP64 drivers.

"latest chipset" - the latest chipsets generally use PCI Express graphics.
(There's an exception, the ULI M1695, which natively supports AGP and PCI-E
16X. I've only seen that available in an Asrock mainboard.) The newest
Socket 939 AMD chipsets that I know of that support AGP are the nVidia
nForce 3 and the Via K8T800 Pro. Mainboard that use either are still for
sale.

SATA RAID 5: you may have trouble finding support for that in hardware. As
far as I know, even the latest nForce 4 chipset, which has 4 SATA
connectors, only supports RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 0+1 in hardware. I have
never tried the software RAID features built into XP.

I hope that is enough information to get you started on your research.


Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
ASUS User said:
I am looking for the following - any suggestions

ASUS Board
SATA Raid 5 capable
AGP
AMD Chipset - latest chipset
Click to expand...

AMD hasn't made a chipset since socket A

Do you mean an AMD compatible chipset?
 
There are boards with RAID 5 in-built, but they are not too common.

If you really need RAID 5 then I suggest an add-in controller so that you
have mobo / chipset / vendor independance - protection against the scenario
of 'my mobo died, I have RAID 5 how do I get the data back problem?

RAID 10 performs better as you no-doubt know - at the expense of disc
drives. RAID 5's pitfall is write performance which is well down on RAID 10.
RAID 5 tends to cost up front, but even if you went RAID 10 you still have
data resurection issues.

www.tomshardware.com has a current review of SATA RAID controllers with PCI
E and 1 X4 controller in the list - the performance is good & they are worth
looking at.

I feel compelled to say that RAID is no substitute for backups - a big
advantge of an add-in controller is Hot Spare drives - minimising dead disc
time is *important* as you are shot if 2nd drive fails otherwise. This is
why RAID 6 is becoming more popular.

HTH
 
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