SATA II 3.0Gb/s Controller Card on PCI

[cmay119]

Hi all, My uncle built a computer with the following specs:

DFI Lanparty UT nF3 250Gb
Athlon 64 3200+ C0 Revision
2x1024MB Kingston ValueRam
Built By ATI X850XT
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB 3.0Gb/s SATAII HDD in RAID 0
Antec Smart Power 2.0 450 Watt PSU
Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum Edition

He doesn't overclock, and he's all in all very happy with his system. He would however, like to get full bandwidth out of his RAID-0 Array. Since it's the nF3 250Gb Chipset it only supports SATA150.

What I'd like to know, is if he picks up a SATAII 3.0Gb/s Controller card, will the PCI bus be able to handle the bandwidth on which SataII would bring. Or would it be a lost cause because of a bottleneck in the PCI Bus.

He doesn't plan on upgrading in a long time, so moving to an nF4 Chipset motherboard with a PCI Express slot would be out of the question to him. Even if it supports AGP at the same time.

He has a couple other devices on his PCI bus right now including:

Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum
D-Link Wireless 802.11g Adapter
ATi TV Tuner card.

How would performance be with these on the PCI bus at the same time?

What if he took out the network card and the TV Tuner card, and only left in the X-Fi?

He's thinking about moving to a USB Wireless adaptor and an external TV Tuner device anyways, so this wouldn't be a problem to remove them.

Thanks in advance guys. :)

This is the SATAII Card in question:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102060

[Special_K]

hey, did you ever get an answer for this?

gonna do the same thing if it werx

let us know if you did, thx

[cmay119]

Not really, no one seems to know/care...

From what I understand though, the card that I put in the first post, will only do a theoretical 266 MB/s data transfer of the possible 3.0Gb/s (384 MB/s) data transfer because of the PCI bandwidth limitation I assume. Although, that's 116 MB/s more of data transfer than what we can get on the standard SATA150. Also the card supports NCQ which can increase drive performance as well. For about $60 it doesn't seem like that bad of an upgrade... :)

[nn_step]

you can not get SATA 3Gb/s speeds out of a PCI slot period.
300mb/s connection can not pass though 133mb/s Slot..
you have to realize this and move on..

[Daved+]

What nn_step said. Just use the onboard SATA-I controller.

[cmay119]

you can not get SATA 3Gb/s speeds out of a PCI slot period.
300mb/s connection can not pass though 133mb/s Slot..
you have to realize this and move on..


That was the information I needed, I didn't know the bandwidth of a 32-bit PCI slot and hence why the question was asked.

[nn_step]

well google can find that information pretty quick man but you didn't quite word it in that way...