Questions about SATA III Mobos, Southbridges, and SSD's

[dmoney1980]

Hello gang ! I have a friend who is looking at getting a fast, quiet, not uber power hungry gaming rig. He does not plan on OC'ing it or using dual GPU's. He wants near top tier performance at stock speeds, all at low temps and noise (Quad core, 5870 GPU, SSD, SATA and USB 3 to futureproof). I have some ideas but I'm a little confused.

Looking at the Intel P55 series, I cant help but notice that people complain about the soluthbridge limitations when using SATA 6 / USB 3 and PCI Express cards. Does anyone here know what they are exactly ?

AMD is a mess as well with their inability to write AHCI drivers that can come close to performing with the Intel drivers (I read a review at Anand that showed the C300 SSD do better on an Intel SATA II port than on an AMD 8 series mobo with SATA III). Plus AMD drivers dont support trim !

Should I just tell him the only way to get top notch performance is X58 ? Are the P55 limitations that serious ? Obviously the best bang for buck deal is AMD, but if you were to pay a price premium for a SATA III capable SSD and Mobo, you should get the performance too.....

looking forward to your input

 

[crucibelle]

dmoney - I know nothing about the Intel side of things, but when it comes to AMD, from what I've read, people are advised to just use the Windows (if you are using Win 7, of course) AHCI drivers. Supposedly those work just fine and also support TRIM.

 

[o1die]

I measured my sata performance using hdtune, a free download. The performance on an amd board was actually higher in ide mode, due to ata 133 support. The Intel board in either ide or achi modes only supports ata 100, so the benchmarks were a little lower. But overall, you won't notice the difference with everyday tasks.

 

[InterfaceMan]

Just installed my rig two weeks ago. Core i5/760 and ASUS P55DP-E Pro mobo with Intel 80 GB SSD and WD SATA 3 drive (1TB) 6GB/s. This Wd drive screams. In sequential write it is faster then my SSD. But overall SSD is sweet and fast. If you buy this WD drive, you need to tweak little bit to make it work for 6GB/s transfer rate.

 

[AstroGuardian]

Why are you concerned about SATA3 and USB3? For a gaming rig you absolutely don't need to be...

 

[dmoney1980]

Why are you concerned about SATA3 and USB3? For a gaming rig you absolutely don't need to be...

I'm just trying to get him the best performance for his dollar, esp if next year SSD's will be using SATA III cotrollers

 

[AstroGuardian]

I'm just trying to get him the best performance for his dollar, esp if next year SSD's will be using SATA III cotrollers

It's more likely that next year's SSDs will use PCI-E