Word of advice on the
MSI K8N neo platinium, while this seems to be a very great board (ordering one myself as soon as available!) its definatly not a good choice for raid:
Acehardware reviews two MSI-boards (Nforce3 250 vs. Via K8T800)
Allow me to go on a rant about the faulty board vs. faulty users ratio:
I think its fair to assume that quite a few users are the source of their own problems, however there are definatly bad/unstable/faulty boards shipping, during the last four years I have build ap 50 boxes, and done troubleshooting on at least 20 others, I belive I have had at least six boards in my hands that was "born unstable".
Three where very cheap ECS-boards, one was an high-end Asus, one was a mid-end Soltek and the last one was my own hellish MSI-K7T266 Pro2-RU
It took me five weeks, and numerous brands of ram, to finaly get this one stable.
Ending up using 2 sticks of samsung 266mhz, which still had to have the voltage slightly increased to run stable - IE and office.applications would generate errors, games would CTD after 10-20mins
(yes I tried numerous psu's, and there was no heat problems)
After using it for 18months, one of the rams fried, again took me a few weeks, and several brands of ram to get it stable again (this time using 2 sticks of elexir 400mhz@266mhz) and keep in mind that this board does not even support "Dual DDR".
Basicly I belive that the introduction of (dual channel/single channel)DDR-controllers, and the competitive race to optimize these, while keeping the price on parts down, has caused a number of boards with an unaceptable (and unprecedented) fault/bad-stability-ratio to hit the market.
Of these six boards, I suspect the memory-controller to be the culprint in atleast five.
I know alot of people would just go with performance-ram, but I reject that argument, theres no way I should have to buy expensive hand-picked ram to run a board stable at stock speeds.
I would
love to see Review-sites start to test for stability with mid-end/cheap ram, and with all ram-sockets filled.