Epox 8KHA+ or Shuttle AK35GTR? Which DDR board?

[Lysimachus]

Hi, I'm having a toss up between these two boards, and I'm not sure which one to go with.

I keep hearing so much about these two boards, and I'm convinced that they are the two best boards on the market!

The Shuttle AK35GTR has proven to be extremely fast...and some reviewers are saying that it's the fastest board they've tested in their labs!

However, at the same time Epox is so well known for how stable their boards are, and their Epox 8KHA+ is very stable according to many reviews.

As far as RAID goes...I'm not really comparing that, so don't compare the two by if one board has raid or not. I really don't see the need for RAID when you only have 1 HD. But I like what I hear about the Shuttle AK35's performance...

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanx

 

[o1die]

Either one will work fine. Just order from a reputable vender such as newegg, in case you have any problems.

 

[senior guy]

Lysimachus:
While it is listed by a few dealers, I don't believe the AK35GTR is available yet. But whether it is or not, if RAID is not part of the reason for choosing (as you indicated), I would go with the 8KHA+. It's definitely faster than the AK31A and I would suspect faster than the AK35GTR. Certainly, the Epox is a far more mature board than the AK35GTR, but if you are playing the waiting game, the Epox 8KHA2 (with RAID) will be here within 30-days.

Wishing everyone a great 2002 !

 

[Lysimachus]

I think I'm starting to lean more toward the Epox now that you said that...I already have the Epox 8k7a and I really like it.

But tell me, what is really RAID for? Isn't it some sort of feature that saves information incase your HD fails or something like that? If it is good, why would someone like me need it? What are all the benefits of RAID?

 

[senior guy]

Good choice!

You will find lots of in-depth discussions on RAID if you do a search. But in my eyes, it boils down to:

RAID level 0 -- 20% performance gain potential accompanied with a 50% greater risk of failure!
RAID level 1 -- 100% greater reliability than using one drive (due to mirroring) but much too slow!
RAID 1+0 -- best of both worlds, but too expensive (you need at least 4 drives to implement it)!

Wishing everyone a great 2002 !

 

[sledge0001]

I would go with the 8kha+ (because I own one). Stable is right! Great fast chipset and great bios features .
Sledge0001

 

[Lysimachus]

Thanx for your input guys.

Will the 8KHA+ work just great after installing it? since I'm not the motherboard techy guy....I want to know that this board is just fine on it's default settings...and that I won't have to read a dozen articles, posts, and download a bunch of patches before I know that this board will function around its best performance!

*Awaiting response*

 

[Quad]

<< RAID 1+0 -- best of both worlds, but too expensive (you need at least 4 drives to implement it)! >>



.....you only need 3 drives for raid 0 + 1

 

[KouklatheCat]

I just got an Epox 8KHA+ and I love it. I was skeptical when I was first looking at it. For the last 7 years I have been buying expensive motherboards because "they are better". I thought how can a board that sells for about $100 bucks be worth anything. I am very pleased with the Epox board and highly recommend it.

The only thing that I did not like it (switching from my A7V) was my old board had an ATA100 channel, a primary IDE and a secondary IDE. I ran my HDD on the ATA, my DVD on IDE primary and CDR on IDE secondary. Now I could really care less, that is how much I like this board.

 

[Essos]

Does anybody know if the RAID controllers on either of these boards can be run in a single mode, so you don't need to use RAID but you can basically have 8 individual IDE devices?

 

[Greatwolf]

I would like to know that too

 

[Quad]

the epox doesn't have a raid controller

i believe that the shuttle's raid controller supports normal ata100 operation (since most boards do). it's interesting to note that the shuttle supports ata133....

 

[senior guy]

<< Does anybody know if the RAID controllers on either of these boards can be run in a single mode, so you don't need to use RAID but you can basically have 8 individual IDE devices? >>

More often than not, the answer is yes, but it depends on the specific RAID controller. For example, I know that the RAID controllers on the Soyo Dragon+ and Asus A7V266-E can be easily configured as a 2nd pair of normal IDE channels, whereas the MSI K7T266 Pro2RU's RAID controller can't.

BTW, I'm not positive, but I believe that the soon to be released Epox 8KHA2 will have an integrated RAID controller.

And IMHO, ATA133 is nothing but 'sizzle' to help sell mobos. Other than ATA133's support for drives larger than 128GB (I can't imagine needing all that storage!), none of today's IDE drives (including the newest ATA133 Maxtors) can come even close to saturating ATA100's bandwidth.