Originally Posted by MaxT
Ok, but just so you know, the only board so far not to use the ATI south birdge is the Abit's AT8 (or whatever they call it). Both DFI boards, and all sapphire boards use/will use ATI's SB450.
As far as the issues go, well, SB450 doesn't support SATAII standard. However, that standard is mostly a marketing gimmick, it offers no performance improvements over SATAI. On top of that, most of the boards will come with an additional raid controller by sil or promise, that supports SATAII devices. Don't quote me on this, but in a case where you really have to, I think you can plug a SATAII hard drive into a SATAI port, and it will work just as fast without any issues.
As far as the USB performance goes - yes, it's a known problem with ATI south bridges. But the problem applies only to sustained speeds, meaning constant non-stop tranfering of information. ATI does it at like half the speed compared to the competitors. But they claim their burst speeds are similar to those of the competition. Meaning the information travels just as fast in small amounts. So, if you use a USB mouse/USB keyboard/USB Joystick, you shouldn;'t notice any difference at all. Where you would see the difference, would be if you used a USB hard drive, it would just be slower.
So the problems are not severe, it depends on wha hardware you will be using with your system.
