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First post, by ribbon13

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Witness! The Asus A8N-Sli has officially been bitch-slapped.

http://tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

Reply 2 of 11, by DosFreak

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Odd, SCSI and SATA integrated on one board......

Kinda off-topic,
Anyone know if there's any advantage of using SATA HD's on SAS controllers?

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Reply 3 of 11, by ribbon13

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Since SAS is Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface, and SATA is Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, I don't think they're meant to be used together. SCSI != ATA. Given the success of the Raptor, Seagate or Maxtor better have some sleak 15,000rpm SAS drives up thier sleeves, or SCSI is history. U320 scsi will have nothing on SATAII controllers + SATAII drives running in RAID in multi-user enviroments.

Reply 6 of 11, by Reckless

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ribbon13 wrote:

Witness! The Asus A8N-Sli has officially been bitch-slapped.

http://tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

The ASUS you quote is standard fair for home PCs (albeit those homes with more cash than me!) whilst the Tyan mobo you linked is for a professional workstation configuration which is like comparing chalk and cheese. Therefore I don't see any bitch slapping going on 😀

Reply 7 of 11, by ribbon13

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That Tyan board is aimed at enthusiast alike, that is why it took longer to release, as Tyan had to make sure it could run with just 1 cpu and SLi. Originally it was going to have two 2200's instead of the 2200/2050 combo, but that would have made 2 cpus prerequisite to use both PCI-E slots. The change was made so it could be aimed at enthusiasts. The sense I meant was that the A8N-Sli is not aimed at regular pc's at all, but gamers and enthusiasts which are a different breed than the Dell and Gateway users of the world. In the sense that the boards share a common potential market, the A8N-Sli has been thoroughly owned.

Personally, I have nothing against the A8N-SLi. My girlfriend wants one even. It has great features like two 4-port SATA controllers, which means a 4x Raptor RAID-0. Not to mention it is VapoChillable, which will really kick ass when dual core 939 chips come out.

Reply 8 of 11, by laxdragon

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Bah, cheap software RAID controllers. If you run Linux don't think you can really get decent RAID on these boards. The chips are designed specifically to use Windows drivers to enable the RAID. So most the the RAID functions are done on the CPU. A real dual channel RAID controller that is all hardware based runs about 400 bucks.

Reply 9 of 11, by ribbon13

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First of all, Linux RAIDs work great on every Tyan board I've ever worked with. Their support staff is great and why I don't buy Iwill. Anyone who is actually gonna get a Tyan board is likely going to put an aftermarket controller in it anyway. Another example of why this board kicks so much ass. No 64-bit/100mhz PCI-X in any quanity on desktop motherboards. And the 3ware 9500s-4lp is the epitome of 4 channel hardware raid, and it's a $100 less that what you said.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp … -116-025&depa=0

for $435 you could have 8-channel hardware based.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp … -116-028&depa=0

Also, Tyan as a server motherboard manufacturer actually has little demand for windows drivers compared to the sheer amount of market share *nix based systems have. And I doubt Nvidia designs its chips around windows. For one the latest Xenon(xbox2) ATi gpu thing would make them rather the opposite of pro-microsoft. The windows drivers get written first because the largest number of dumb users and users who are most likely to complain first all use windows. So what? That's just the way it is. Not to mention well written UNIX drivers are easy to port.

Reply 10 of 11, by laxdragon

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http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Most mobo manufactures throw on a cheap SATA RAID controller just as a bullet point. Anyone who really needs RAID would never use one of these fakeraid based chipsets. I found this out the hard way when I picked up a MSI K8T Master 2 Dual Opteron mobo. I ended up just using the software RAID that is built into the Linux kernel instead of using the crap VIA controller built on the mobo. Had I know this before I picked up this mobo, I would have went with a mobo that had 64 bit PCI slots so I could use a 3rd party controller such as 3ware or Adaptec. The K8T does not have any. So, I'm still a bit bitter about it.

Reply 11 of 11, by ribbon13

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Those 3ware cards will work in plain pci slots, albiet limited to regular pci's bandwidth. The bright side is if you already have a 200 series processor and registered ddr333/400, and a big enough case, you can get a K8WE soon. 😜
The few places I've seen them charged just a little less than the Iwill "DK8N", which is $470 at newegg. They probably won't have them until the end of february. I can't wait for newegg to get some K8WEs in stock. =D

As for software, with a dual opteron , I doubt anything will be choking for cpu because of software raid XOR calculations, and the majority of onboard SATA controllers don't support RAID-5 anyway.