Future Motherboard for Dual Core AMD64?

[Eidi]

I know that dual core AMD64s will be for socket 939, but does anyone know if there might be future improvements in motherboards for dual core processors specifically?

I've been looking at the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-517&depa=1) for a motherboard, would this work well for a dual-core AMD64?

Do current AMD64 boards support DDR2? If not, should I wait for that?

Also, not on the topic of motherboards really, but with 4 SATA slots, how many drives could it support? I'd like to at least get 4 300 gig drives to make a 1 TB RAID array. With 1 raptor for my OSes. What's the likelyhood of a RAID array like that to fail? I assume it's not too high, but I don't know for certain.

Thanks to anyone in advance who answers my questions.

 

[Crashman]

Current Athlon 64 CPU's do not support DDR2, and AMD doesn't have any plans to support DDR2 in the near future.

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[endyen]

Sata is one drive per slot. The deluxe board has two sata controllers, with 4 sata slots on each. The board will support up to 12 hdds/optical drives. The 4 satas on the silicon image can only be set up in raid together(not with the nforce drive) The nforce raid can include the 4 satas, and the 4 ide drives.
No-one knows for sure if dual core chips will work on current boards. At this point, a new chipset to support dual cores is unheard of, so chances are good that that board will support them.

 

[Eidi]

Ok, thanks for the info guys. 4 SATA slots should be enough for what I want then.

Crashman: Do you know why they won't support DDR2 RAM? It seems to me DDR2 is better than DDR. I don't know the specifics saying if it is better or not though...

 

[Crashman]

DDR2 isn't necessarily "better" than DDR. It generally has more latency. So DDR2 400 is generally offering worse performance than DDR400. DDR533 is generally offering similar performance to DDR400. And while DDR2 667 offers better performance than DDR400, the relies on the CPU to actually use the extra bandwidth. A64's aren't known for actually needing the extra bandwidth, so AMD has made the wise decision to hold off on DDR2 for a while.

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[Codesmith]

People also used to ask why AMD motherboards were not supporting RAMBUS.

DDR currently outperforms DDR2.
DDR currently is cheaper than DDR2.

Both of these things are likely to change in the future, just not any time soon.