SATA Raid Questions + Small SLI Question

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Zanai

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SATA Raid Questions + Small SLI + CPU Question

Hello there, just abit of background first, been using,building repairing etc... computers for ages since the good ole pentium 1 but past few years ive had other things to do as well so kind of lost track with the way things are going at the moment.

Last PC i had i built when sata first came out and i got 2x 80gb maxtor sata drives and ran them in raid 0 on the onboard southbridge via chipset controller. Not sure what chipset is was, kt - something. But anyways had a 3200 xp in that machine and tried various times with windows xp but failure each time (after about 2 months the installtion got corrupt and it wouldnt boot) stuck with windows 98 and the machine ran like lightning. Last year i traded that in for an nforce 2 chipset motherboard (same cpu) and used an adaptec 39360 scsi raid controller card and had 2 15k.3 cheetahs hooked up, performance was about the same as the old sata array due to restrictions of using the card in a normal pci slot. Anyways ive sold that pc and am just using my laptop at the moment with about 5 million external devices attached :p

My question is what sort of range of sata options are available on current motherboards, noticed quite a few seem to have built in raid as well as an addin sata raid controller (but most of these seem to be on the pci bus). Id like to get an option where i can hook up 4 or 8 wd raptors in raid 0 on 1 array without bandwidth being restricted? Or is only only option to get a motherboard with a 4x pci-e slot and buy a seperate sata raid controller card?

Also on a seperate note is SLI overhyped or actually really worth the investment? (Last card i had was a radeon x850 xt pe it played everything ok but FEAR was abit slow sometimes) I dont want to invest over $600 in SLI then find out i could just buy 1 card :p

Finally whats the different between the X2 and FX models of AMD CPUs?
 
get an SLI mobo, and one sli ready card, then when you want a cheap performance boost, buy the same card you have but in like 2 years when they're like 80 bucks :p thats what im doing

otherwise, the performance increase you get from SLI is mostly in anti aliasing and anistropic filtering. they effect your fps less, which is good lol but i dont think its worth buying two cards right from the get go
 
Ahh cool thanks, im a 1024x768 addict anyways with my old 17" crt :p but do like to use AA and AF when possible.
 
Been reading about all afternoon and found that out. Just need to find out what Athlon FXs are now :p
 
Ahh had a few people suggest i use a 165 opteron and overclock it instead of buying an x2 4400 any opinions on that here?

(mainly use pc for dvd editing but generally multitask with other things at same time)
 
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