Gigabyte GA-8KNXP has SATA RAID? any alternatives?

[SOhp101]

Nevermind, I got info from someone that the raid controller applies to both the ide and sata.

But does anyone have recommendations for a good P4 875P motherboard? I've been looking at this Gigabyte and the ABIT IC7-MAX3 (this board explicitly states that it has SATA RAID) and also the MSI NEO-FIS2R. If you know any other motherboards that would be really good to use in about a $150-250 price range, leave a note.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by SOhp101 on 10/15/03 08:51 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[simleep]

I can't say I can recommend one to buy, but I can recommend not to buy the MSI. I have Neo-2 FIS2R and it has been nothing but trouble. In fact with the latest problem had to RMA the board. That was 5 weeks ago and I still have no word when I might get the board back.

 

[search4stability]

I just got a GA-8KNXP (REV 2.0) board a couple weeks ago. It actually has three RAID controllers. Both the ICH5R and SiI 3112A are SATA RAID controllers, and with the latest BIOS (mine came with "FB" installed by Gigabyte) supports both RAID 0 and RAID 1 on both controllers. There's also a GigaRAID controller for IDE devices IDE3 and IDE4, but I am not using this in my system. Note that the IDE RAID is not available on IDE1 and IDE2.

NOTE: Only the ICH5R chip supports RAID. The ICH5 chip does not, so carefully check the motherboards you are looking at to make sure they use the 'R' version ICH5R chip.

I've been having plenty of trouble installing Windows XP, and have yet to achieve a stable system with all the drivers loaded. So I can't make any recommendations yet...

 

[search4stability]

Just to follow up my previous post in this thread, I found that the cause of instability on my system during the Windows XP install was due to memory timing. (Search for my posts in another GA-8KNXP thread for the details.) MemTest-86 showed that the [SPD] settings of the memory (2.5/6/2/2) were causing memory faults. After reading many 8KNXP posts across the 'net I changed my memory settings to 2.5/6/3/3. My system then passed all of the MemTest-86 tests without faults, and my driver installation has gone smoothly.

I still have yet to run any real applications on this board, and haven't even considered over-clocking. But I like its features and flexibility. Hopefully a later BIOS update will allow me to restore my 2.5/6/2/2 memory timings...