Question : Problem: Advice sought on motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 3800+

I have a *lot* of questions. I am not looking for an answer to everything for the points on offer though - any information that gets me nearer to the goal of having a working PC will be very useful. URLs to useful web sites and recommendations for companies that have a helpful sales department  will also be helpful.

I am putting together a bare-bones PC in the UK. It has been a while since I did this and I need some advice about options that are new to me.

Option one is SATA. At the moment all my hard disks are IDE although I need to buy at least one new drive, possibly two if I go for Option 2: RAID.

My questions:

Is it even possible to buy a motherboard for the AMD64 3800+ that does NOT have SATA/RAID these days? I couldn't find one in the (unhelpfully laid-out) on-line store I was looking at.

I quite like the idea of getting SATA, but I am not sure how it works re the devices you can connect. With IDE you can connect two devices per IDE socket, and you get two sockets as standard. What is the situation re SATA? Can you connect more than one SATA device to a single SATA socket? Does this affect performance?

Do m'boards that have SATA sockets also have IDE sockets ? I saw one board that seemed to imply it had one connection of each type. Is this standard or does it vary from board to board?

Re RAID. My understanding is that if you "have RAID" then you have a system that has one or more pairs of hard disks such that one disk automatically keeps a copy of what is on the other disk so that if one disk dies then you still have the data on the other disk. I also understand that RAID is like LAN/audio in that you can have the service on-board or have a separate card.

Is on-board RAID worth having? A few years ago they started to sell boards on-board audio but the quality was dreadful (is it any better these days - I still use my trusty SoundBlaster Live!?). OTOH on-board LAN was a god-send for those of us with systems bursting at the seems with PCI cards.

As with SATA, I'd like to know how RAID configured as far as sockets and devices are concerned. I don't want to get a board that "has RAID" but at the expense of having no IDE sockets - well, without being aware of that before I buy anyway.

Many thanks for any help,

K

Answer : Problem: Advice sought on motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 3800+

>Is it even possible to buy a motherboard for the AMD64 3800+ that does NOT have SATA/RAID these days? I couldn't find one in the (unhelpfully laid-out) on-line store I was looking at.

Probably not.  It is very cheap for manufacturers to include RAID these days, and software RAID controllers that use the cpu are not very expensive.  It's no big deal, don't use it if you don't want it.

>Can you connect more than one SATA device to a single SATA socket? Does this affect performance?

No.  SATA is designed to not share the cable - that's how it achieves the speed and small size of cable.  Motherboards typically have more than one SATA connector to let you do this, and some have up to four.

>Do m'boards that have SATA sockets also have IDE sockets ? I saw one board that seemed to imply it had one connection of each type. Is this standard or does it vary from board to board?

Yes, this should be standard.  SATA optical devices have just come out, so there are a lot devices that still need the IDE connector.  Besides, for continuous throughput of large files, IDE is no worse than SATA.

>Is on-board RAID worth having? A few years ago they started to sell boards on-board audio but the quality was dreadful (is it any better these days - I still use my trusty SoundBlaster Live!?). OTOH on-board LAN was a god-send for those of us with systems bursting at the seems with PCI cards.

Onboard RAID is also known as software RAID currently, which means it's not very sophisticated and it uses your cpu to process commands.  I agree that most onboard stuff, with the exception of networking, USB and Firewire, is better on separate cards: video, audio, and RAID.  Onboard RAID is ok for non-critical applications, and I think it doesn't support RAID-5.  Separate cards are better for where it has to be reliable and you don't want the cpu burdened.