Originally posted by: GooN3r
I have a few questions about the Asus A8N-Sli motherboard.
1. I have an Antec True Blue 480w PSU, will this be sufficient. I have read a lot of articles about the A8N needing a 24pin connection, is my PSU good enough?
2. I have also ordered 2x WD Raptors which I intend to setup in a RAID 0 array. Do I need a floppy drive to do this?
3. Which SATA controller is better, Silicon Image SATA controller or the nForce4 SLI?s built in SATA?
1. You can use a quality 20pin PS, they work perfectly on this board, you just leave the four pins nearest the graphics card open. They are redundant(extra) leads for the 3v,5v,12v rails and an extra ground.
I am running this board with a 20pin Antec true control 550 w/30a 12v rail, it has been rock solid so far. I have 2 optical drives, 1 250gb ATA drive, 2 SATA raptors (w/2 fans on each) RAID0, and 1 XFX 6600GT
My winchester 3200+ is clocked @ htt 267.4 x 9.5 = 2541.8mhz 4x multi @ 1067 fsb
2. Yes, you can boot the system to the mobo CD and create the diskette, but you do need a floppy to set up a raid array. Windows won't load the required drivers from CD. And there are two drivers created on the diskette, make sure to load both. You have to load the first one, hit S again and load the second one.
3. I'm using the nforce4, I think the performance will be better on the native nforce4 controller.
Unless you want to use the software RAID5 capabilities (only available on the Silicon chip).