DreamMaker said:
Hi a got a bounch of pci 2.2 on my a7n8x-x
it suppose to run at 66mhgz twice as a pci 1
does it mean that my onboard ide controller as the same particularity?
Because have read lattely that having this kind of pci slot with a pci
ide controler card would be better than the on board ide controler
is this true and does it worth the 50$ ide controler from maxtor ???
First off, the onboard IDE integrated into the southbridge can use a
pretty speedy direct link to the northbridge (with a bandwidth of at
least twice that of 32 bit 33 MHz PCI), which is a normal feature of
chipsets these days.
Any PCI card you plug in will be limited by the 32 bit 33 MHz PCI bus on
the board. Even if the board could run PCI at 66 MHz (which it can't),
all the cards on one bus would have to support 66 MHz operation
(something that is true of the newer Promise IDE controller cards, for
example), and you couldn't have more than three cards or so on one bus.
(That's why 760MPX boards use a PCI-PCI bridge for some 32 bit 33 MHz
slots in addition to the 64 bit 66 MHz PCI provided by the northbridge.)
The PCI spec the onboard PCI implementation conforms to has rather
little to do with the speeds actually supported - 66 MHz operation has
been supported since PCI 2.1 (even 64 bit PCI exists since 2.0), but the
vast majority of PCI 2.1/2.2/2.3 compliant boards have neither 64 bit
PCI slots (take up a lot of space on normal-sized ATX boards, increase
cost) nor do they support 66 MHz operation (bridge chips also take up
space and add to the cost).
So all in all, IDE performance should be best with the onboard
controller (in the southbridge) on the A7N8X (or any other current
consumer-level board).
Stephan
