"Jody said:
Good thing I didn't order it then?
I was comparing the boards and I could only find a difference of the E
version has better audio. o_O
http://groups.google.ca/[email protected]
The audio is about equal, due to the fact that the eight channel
mode prevents the Aux connector from working. If you have a TV
card, that uses the Aux connector on the motherboard, then the Realtek
sound would have to be set to six channel anyway. On the AD1985,
I'd be interested to see if you hear the odd click come through
the speakers, because that is something I can hear right now
on my AD1985. I haven't managed to trace down where it is coming
from - it isn't likely interference, but could be a driver issue
of some sort.
The real difference between the boards would be in the RAID
controller. A quick Google shows some complaints about the
Via6410 CPU utilization and performance in RAID mode. It
suggests the 6410 relies more on software for its RAID functions
than some other controllers.
The Promise 20378, on the other hand, has that annoying combo
of two SATA ports and one IDE cable. Which is fine if you want
to RAID a couple of SATA drives. But how many people just
happen to have an IDE drive and a SATA drive they want to
RAID together ?
Both the VIA 6410 and the Promise 20378 don't do ATAPI, so
you cannot hang CD/DVD drives off those chips. You can place
single hard drives on there, but I would be wary about
whether a drive placed on those controllers, can be easily
moved from the RAID chip to the Intel Southbridge interface.
It is something I'd want to test somehow, before putting valuable
data on the drive. (I had something funny happen to my first
partition on a drive, when moving from 20378 to Southbridge,
and that is why I mention it. RAID chips and their firmware,
like to reserve a sector to store RAID ID info. Since I was
cloning the drive at the time, no data was lost, and I just
started over again.)
As far as your RAM goes, I wouldn't expect any surprises
putting RAM on there. There might be the odd stick that
isn't happy on the 865PE, but to a much lesser extent than
say on an Nforce2 board.
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=1828&p=11
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=1831&p=9
Paul
I have a P4 2.8E 800FSB with 2 512 Micron PC3200 DDR right now,