Silk I7 Bundle ASUS P6X58D Premium SATA 6 question

[Tony2cakes]

Hi Folks,
After knocking the Edge I7 Gigabyte bundle into touch,
Now looking at the Asus P6X58D Premium mobo in the Silk I7 Bundle.

Can anyone confirm if the 2 SATA 6 ports can be configured for boot up in the Bios?
Also can they be used in a Raid 0 configuration?

Looking at the few screen shots of the bios screens on the web, or the asus manual, this does not seem clear if this can be done. These are key features I would want. so I need to 100% sure this can be done.

I have also contacted asus vip support and emailed Paul Moss at Scan but have yet to recieve a response.

Thank you all in advance :-)

[Mossy]

I am on it Tony

Regards

[kalniel]

Boot up should happen automatically - you would select the hard drive to boot from once they are connected (don't have any first hand experience of it though). Good question about RAID though, it would be down to the marvell 88SE9123-NAA2 controller.

EDIT: Hmm depends if that's the exact number of the controller.. Marvell don't recognise it, but state that the 88SE9128 is RAID, 88SE9125/88SE9120 are not RAID.

This review seems to state they can RAID:
http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi..._premium/3.htm

[scaryjim]

Hating to be the cat among the pigeons, but since AMDs SB850 supports 6 SATA3 drives in RAID natively, you could always ditch the i7 bundle and go for a Phenom II X6 + 890FX / 890GX mobo, if booting from RAID0 SATA3 drives is a requirement...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Also what is the PC being used for BTW??

For any software which scales well with more cores I would definitely have a look at the Phenom II X6.

[arthurleung]

If you are planning to RAID0, why not get 4 SSDs at SATA-300 instead of 2 SSDs at SATA-600?
Neither setup will support TRIM command anyway so there is no benefit whatsoever to go for SATA-600.

[Tony2cakes]

Thank you all very much for talking the time to assist and share your knowledge. I have gained some very good info here, what a fantastic forum this is!
It looks like I will avoid the SSD raid config and just go with the single SSD boot.
Looking at the link for the review it would seem to indicate you can boot from SSD. I will probably go with the Intel platform for now. The AMD looks very interesting but after about 2 weeks of research prior to me dropping £1000+ on a new setup I am exhausted.

My main use for this setup is Hi def cad rendering and video transcoding. Would the AMD platform do this any better? All additional input is very welcome

Thank you all again.

[arthurleung]

Thank you all very much for talking the time to assist and share your knowledge. I have gained some very good info here, what a fantastic forum this is!
It looks like I will avoid the SSD raid config and just go with the single SSD boot.
Looking at the link for the review it would seem to indicate you can boot from SSD. I will probably go with the Intel platform for now. The AMD looks very interesting but after about 2 weeks of research prior to me dropping £1000+ on a new setup I am exhausted.

My main use for this setup is Hi def cad rendering and video transcoding. Would the AMD platform do this any better? All additional input is very welcome

Thank you all again.

Highly depends on what you mean by hi def cad rendering. If it is the engineer kind, most of them don't support multi-threading, so get the fastest dual/tri core CPU. Compare it with your existing system with the CAD software. If you feel it is too slow, then check why is it slow. It could be not enough memory, or just simply it is running single threaded. Or remotely possible that you need a better graphics cad.

Neither of the two applications you listed require fast hard drive access, which even a green drive can handle the load.

Dropping £1000 to a machine is nothing when your CAD software is going to cost as much, if not more. Note that Intel still beat AMD in terms of per core performance and you'll need to take that into account when purchasing the CAD software license. I've seen at least a few scientific / engineering software charge by the number of cores / threads.