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General discussion

New motherboard set-up

Oct 14, 2004 2:31AM PDT

I have a dumb question...I have build 5 or 6 new systems with an Anthlon XP processor, asus motherboard, cdrw, 128 agp video card, 512 mb DDR ram, ect. I want to build a new system that is faster for games like Doom 3, ect. but I have no knowledge of the new motherboards that support Raid,ect. My question is:
can you buy an athlon 64 chip and motherboard and get the speed advantage but connect your drives the old way with the ata cable and not connect any raid or do you have to set up the mb with raid?

Discussion is locked

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Go to
Oct 14, 2004 7:50AM PDT
www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com and read the articles on mobo's for the 64 bit CPU's. If you can afford it get a mobo with a 939 socket, then both versions of the 939 CPU's support dual memory and do not require resistered DDR. This socket is the one that AMD will support for a year or two, all the others are being phased out. [the 940 is actually an earlier model]

Many of the better mobo's include a RAID chip on the mobo in addition to the one that may be part of the chipset [some newer chipsets only support SATA RAID.]. The same option can exist fot SATA RAID, only RAID or also use for IDE drives. [SATA drives are also a form of IDE drive, but not ATA]

You must review the articles to see if the RAID controller will only support RAID or if the controller will allow running ATA drives and also ATAPI drives, Not all of the chips do. Gigabyte's ITE gigaraid chip allows all options. So allow ATA but not ATAPI.

No real way to find out but read such articles.
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IIn my post, near the bottom.
Oct 14, 2004 8:07AM PDT

"so allow ATA but not ATAPI" should read some allow**** .