Robertsonland wrote:
HA! That is funny...Ok..so if I have an intel nic here would there be another reason to stay away from this board? Do you suggest a PCIe card for the raid card too?
Lance
To be honest, go with what you can get for a reasonable price. In the past I would have strayed away from Realtek NIC based cards but not so now. They have reached a level of maturity where there is very little difference in performance against other NIC chips from the likes of Broadcom, Intel, National Semiconductor, etc. The nice thing about this chip is that it sits on the PCIe bus controller and so it will not eat PCI bandwidth that the RAID card will be trying to use. I would go for the board if it has what you need. Likely the performance of any of the RAID cards, Either PCIX or PCIe are going to be fine for your needs. If you already have the PCI card then I see no reason for change provided it meets needs. If you can get the board and memory for cheap and the processor for free, then I would expect that the performance would be adequate. It is likely though that you will not see above 50MB/sec on the gigE network no matter what because of the RAID card. Most all RAID cards are not going to have the horse power to crunch the ECC of a RAID5 stripe at high speeds. But I digress as this would be for another thread.
Mike