Raid Controller Questions

Well some background info on my situation is I bought a semi budget system, primary use school work and lots of gamming:
Mobo: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GBx2
Ram: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM

Ok, now that you know the main components of my system my delima is the fact that I want to set up raid-0 (striping) on my 2 hard drives. The problem that I am running into comes from the fact that my motherboard does not auctially have a hardware raid setup that is built in, it has a raid chip but it is a software raid. Because of this I cannot install a main opperating system under this raid setup, which was my main intent. And being so unfamaliar with raid I want to get my goal accomplished by making a hardware raid. In order to do this I must buy a Raid Controller but the reviews I find here are for more industrial uses. I guess its very hard for me to figure out the specifics of what I need in the raid card for the performance I require and the price that I will pay.

Some points I have come to are:
1) Mobo has one 1xPCI and 4xPCI slot avail, from what I have read, the 1xPCI slot is ample enough, right?
2) My hard drives are the SATA 3.0 Gb/s, so I want the card to support this.
3) I dont plan on exending my raid much past 2 HDD, max ever will be 4 if i do a raid 0+1.

Thanks in advance for the help.

I have 2 raid 0's running on that exact mobo works great use the silicon chip for your raid the performance is slightly better.

I have the exact same board and my system drive is a raid 1 on the Nvidia controller. Use the RAID floppies that came with the board during the windows install - you know, like the manual says.

Also, the nvraid supports sata-2, 300mb/s while the silicon image only supports sata-1, 150mb/s.

You can always d/l the nforce chipset drivers and create a sata floppy the way the manual describes.