Help Me Pick A MB

[Justintoxicated]

So far im looking at either an Nforce2 or KT400.

From what i have been seeing the KT-400's have an easier time doing 200 FSB than the Nforce2 boards. Is This True?

Im pairing it with a 1800+ Tbred and a GF4 4600 (if i can RMA the sucker) 1 stick of Corsair PC3200 C2.

Another reason i was looking at picking up the epox KT400 board was that it supports raid-0 so i could keep my WD SE HD's running fast.

Is going Nforce2 going to give me a much better overclock and preformance despite these things? Or should i go with the KT-400 Solution and keep my raid? I was going to buy a seperate Raid card to raid my ATA100 drives but i can't see paying as much for a raid card as it would cost me for the MB.

I have about a week to decide before i have to make my final decision, perhaps longer if it takes gainward a month to RMA the Vid card.

[Justintoxicated]

Anyone?

Another thing i have been thinking about is that not only would Nforce2 not have raid but it would also force me to run a HD and a CD rom on each channel, instead of having a seperate channel for each HD...How much performance difference is there between Raid-0 on 2 independent channels vs having a CD-rom and HD on each channel and No raid?

Seems like there would be a huge difference! Anyone?

Is there a decent raid card available to my WD SE HD's for around 50$?

[RacerX]

In the same boat here also. Tired of data corruption on my KD7, plus I think I damaged it running a 3dmark at 210fsb.:eek:

Anyways tomorrow will be ordering either the NF7-S or the AT7 max2. The NF7-S scares me alittle with the low voltages. Could be a easy fix with a new bios but I fear that Abit's bios team might not go for it.

The AT7 Max2 rev.1.1 might be the KT400 board to get right now. Shadco here in the forums seems to be running fine over 210fsb without corruption. Maybe Abit's technicians found whats causing the corruptions. I wish they would do the same with the KD7's.

[Justintoxicated]

yea its pretty crappy that the options are

a) Run the raid on the KT-400 but if you want high FSB you have to run your HD's way out of spec (noot a good idea for raid)

or

b) Run any FSB you want, but have no option for Raid-0, and you must max out all of your IDE ports..

seems these so called engineers got it all backasswards!

[felix88]

Justintoxicated, you may have to break down and just buy the raid card.

if you buy the right one, you can take it with you when you upgrade your motherboard or drives.

the Highpoint RocketRAID 1520 is a good example, as it comes with SATA > PATA adapters. for the time being, you could raid your 2 SE's and when you upgrade to SATA hard drives you could use the same card to raid them.

you could argue that the Nforce2 board comes with SATA and an adapter, but the board is $148 and it only comes with 1 adapter. the second adapter will run you another $40. you also can't take the raid card with you when you upgrade your motherboard.

[Justintoxicated]

can u explain more about the rocket raid? is it better than promise? I know highpoint onboard raid is a bit better than promise...

Also how does the card work? Does it also need adapters to use ATA 100 drives? That does sound like a good option. How much is this raid card? if i buy the epox NF2 ill only have to pay 50$...Im getting 80$ for my 8k3a+ next week, so this is why i urgently need a new board.

[felix88]

i'm not sure about the price, but the 1520 is a 2 channel SATA raid card. it comes with 2 adapters.

i'm not a raid wiz, but i've heard some good things about this card. there is a 4 channel version as well, but i believe it's pretty spendy.

oh, and if you can wait for this guy to respond to his thread, he may know where to get the epox board for $114. maybe you could pm him.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6058

[Erik21d]

I bought the HP RocketRAID 1520 with my Epox NF2 mobo and I couldn't get the thing to work properly. I think one of the IDE to SATA convertors was bad cus when I tried the one that came with my AT7-MAX2 it would work, but I couldn't get into windows without a windows CD in the dvd drive.

I think there might be a prob with the epox mobo and that raid card together or it could have been just a bad card. I had alot of broken arrays requiring me to restart consently until it would work. Needless to say I'm returning it...

BTW I was using it with 2 120GB WD SE drives. On Windows XP I would get 57kb/sec in sandra, so performance wasn't lacking it was the stability.

[felix88]

sounds like you got a bad card or maybe a bad adapter. i know a couple of people with these cards working fine.

[Erik21d]

Well thats good to hear that it will work with a raid card. I bought a Promise to replace it...hope its a good one :)

[felix88]

i didn't know promise made a SATA raid card. does it come with adapters?

[Justintoxicated]

I think im just going to go ahead and get the stuff from newegg since i have had mailtheft and shipping problems. Plus i can't beat the fact that newegg always seems to deliver by the day after i order or the day after that if i order on the weekend...last time it was just about 24 hours and i had the stuff at my door. Fedex is the best.

It's $90 for that raid card though, so ill actually be spending more on the raid card than the MB itself.

it would be slightly cheaper to go with the chaintech board, but i have never owned a chaintech MB and the raid card would not be removable.

[Erik21d]

Its not sata :) But I heard people getting it to work with the epox so I went for it. Plus I dont think I'll be upgrading to sata hard drives any time soon.

[felix88]

so you ended up buying the 8RDA+ and the RocketRAID 1520?

let us know how it works.

[Justintoxicated]

im not sure i like the extra adapters, i like my UV cables...are there any GOOD 35-50$ raid card that i can use my drives with?

At least the cables are thin though, so its still a definate option. Definately going for the epox board if ic an get a good raid card for cheap.