Best mb/platform for Hard Drive/PCI HDTV performance

[Kishkumen]

I have been a big fan of HDTV for some time now. I have had a HiDTV Pro 2.0 HDTV PCI card on an Athlon XP based A7N8X Deluxe for quite sometime now. However, I would like to make this system a little more robust by moving Hard Drive subsystem off of the main PCI bus which tends to get saturated when my RAIDed Raptors are running at full speed. Now my understanding is that the only way to do so before PCI Express arrives is to use an Intel board which has ICH5-R support. I would like to get an Athlon 64, but my understanding is that there is no equivalent to ICH5 on AMD's side of the fence so all hard drive access will still hit the PCI bus if I choose AMD. Am I correct in this?

Assuming that my understanding of hard drive/PCI performance between AMD and Intel is correct (and please correct me if I am not), then I plan to get the Abit IC7-G as recommend from the Anandtech's March high-end buyers guide. Are there any opinions on this board? Is there one you feel is better? Is that board likely to remain on the guide for April?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and opinions.

 

[Peter]

VIA and SiS also have south bridges w/ integrated, RAID0/1-able SATA controllers that are NOT on the PCI bus. SiS chipsets particularly excel in those streaming applications due to their multi-threaded I/O link architecture.

 

[Kishkumen]

Thanks for the info. I never realized that there were other chipsets with ICH-like features and I've read the SiS 755 review before. I guess I must have glossed over it. I've always wished that motherboard reviews and in particular chipset reviews gave more time to hard drive performance as it seems to me increasing performance there would give you overall more bang for the buck than just overclocking or lower memory timings. Anyway the SiS964 looks pretty interesting as a south bridge definitely worth more investigation. Either way it looks like I may not have to wait for PCI Express to adopt Athon 64. I wonder why AMD doesn't use Hypertransport more. It seems to me that it can do everything PCI-X can and still be backwards compatible with existing PCI devices, but its only used for connected north and south bridges which seems a waste of functionality to me, but maybe I have it wrong and Hypertransport isn't as robust as it seems.

 

[Vette73]

Hypertransport is NOT the connection between the North and south bridge, but the connection between the memory controller and ram or from CPU to CPU in dual setups, etc...

But yea a VIA or Sis chipset with the new southbridge puts the SATA throug them not the PCI bus and nivida next chipset will also have TRUE Sata support.

 

[Peter]

Yes it is ... AMD, NVidia and ALi chipsets use HyperTransport all the way down to the south bridge. VIA and SiS, having come up with their own proprietary high speed interconnect way before HT appeared on the map, don't.