A7V333RAID or A7V333 OR A7S333?? Help!

[dead0eye]

I'm just about to embark to a journey of upgrading soon, and need a couple of points to help me out.

1. How big is the performance difference between the VIA and SIS chipset motherboards? A7S333 is almost half the price of
A7333. Generally speaking, which one should I go for, A7V333 OR A7S333?

2. Assuming that I should go for the A7V333, should I RAID or not RAID? What's the pros and cons with RAID?

3. Is it really necessary for me to upgrade my BIOS to the latest one?

4. If you guys have any other mobo suggestions, rather than the ones that I've mentioned, by all means, please tell me, thanks.

5. PC2100 or PC2700? and what is the min PSU required?

Thanks ....

 

[mechBgon]

Seems like about 10% performance difference between the chipsets. Keep in mind that $75-80 gets you the Gigabyte 7VRX, with onboard USB 2.0, or the Shuttle AK35GT2, or the MSI KT3 Ultra, and all three of these are KT333-based boards like the A7V333.

The RAID version of A7V333 adds not only RAID, but also onboard FireWire, which the non-RAID version doesn't have. RAID can be used (hope I'm not stating the obvious here) for adding speed or redundancy, using RAID0 or RAID1. The onboard RAID controller on the board cannot do RAID0+1, by the way, but that would mean buying four identical drives anyway. If you don't really need a RAID, you can also just use it for some extra hard drives in the normal fashion.

PC2700 will get you a little more performance, or you can simply use it to start from PC2100 speeds and use the headroom to overclock. Look in onelin0's A7V333 thread for some more info that might be helpful. He has given some benchmarks with different memory timings, and I threw in some of my own experiences, along with a guide to using the MyLogo feature so your board can have a custom boot-up logo embedded in the BIOS.

As far as PSUs go, I'm looking at the trend and thinking at least an Antec TruePower330 or Enermax 365.

Upgrading BIOS... not unless you have a reason. Unfortunately, one reason would be... to use the MyLogo feature! It involves flashing the BIOS. I've flashed my A7V333R about five times, no problems, but I had a bad flash on another of the same board and had to RMA it with Asus. I heartily recommend NOT using a floppy diskette to get the new BIOS. Download it to hard drive and flash it from there.

 

[kennysdead]

 

[kennysdead]

It's not worth it to go with 333DDR and run async, especially with the SiS board. Only makes sense if you're going to OC the FSB, then you might want to get the RAM to keep up with it.