U320 Motherboard Help

[augusts]

Hello,
New to these Forums, I am upgrading my Computer and need to find a Motherboard with onboard SCSI U320 would be nice. The CPU will be 3.2 intel or higher. Am using this computer for graphics design, CAD/CAM, some gaming. I've been using SCSI fro a long time and since the company I work for gets the bill for this upgrade I'm not to concerned about cost, just want to get the best M/B for the money. Any help would be great.


August

 

[Crashman]

Gigabyte has such a board, it's very expensive, their top end 875P chipset model. But you really should think about this: PCI bus bandwidth is only 133MB/s. Even the fastest U320 drives can't fill that unless you use a large RAID cluster. So then, what's the point of U320?

You see, the onboard controller is a PCI device like any other. They simply soldered the parts you'd normally find on a PCI card directly to the motherboard. It still uses a PCI bus for access. And the 875P (fastest Intel chipset) doesn't support faster busses except for it's proprietary CSA gigabit LAN bus (which is 266MB/s) and it's on-chipset SATA controller (same deal).

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[augusts]

Crashman, thanks for the reply, since that's the case why does anybody bother with U320? What other motherboards with the 875 chipsets would you recommend? Thanks for the info.

August

 

[Crashman]

Why does anybody bother with AGP8x? The numbers sound impressive. Besides, there ARE server boards with PCI-X slots that are 66MHz and 64-bit (533MB/s peak bandwidth), but they use special chipsets (server chipsets tend to perform worse than PC chipsets, but offer greater throughput thanks to special slots and so forth). File servers don't need great overall performance, just great throughput for drives and networking.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[augusts]

That's some great info! Now the $25.00 question, if money was not to much of an issue, what MOBO would you go with?

 

[Crashman]

I've been recommending the Abit IS7 for almost every budget because I can't find any reason to spend more, even if you have the money.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Black_Cat]

You owe Crashman $25. I have an Adaptec 2120S U320 with two 73GB Seagate 15k Cheetahs in a RAID 0 and don't see much appreciable difference over an ATA RAID in real-world apps. Plus these drives generate immense amounts of heat. Perhaps if I had a 64 bit PCI slot I would see a difference, but as Crash stated I'll lose performance in other areas. I'm just waiting for 64 bit PCI slots to make their way into desktop mobos.

Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer. -- Homer Simpson.

 

[augusts]

Crashman,
Do you see any difference between the 865 and the 875 chipset? I see that the IS7 is the 865 chipset, if the 875 chipset is better which board would oyu go with? Thanks for putting up with all these questions, just let me know where I have to send my payments for all this great info. ;-)

August

 

[Crashman]

Little secret 865PE and 875P are the same chipset northbridge. Intel only disables PAT in a couple registers and eliminates the pins needed for ECC RAM from the 865PE's pin grid. All the performance comparisons I see show no noticable performance difference.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>