Sli Bridge Pci

Sli Bridge Pci

Does anyone know about RAID, SLI, and Core i7?

What is better to use.. the motherboards RAID if possible, or is PCI raid better?

What steps do you need to take to set up a motherboard RAID for the OS compared to setting up a PCI raid?

Is it possible to set up RAID 0 and 1 with 3 hard drives so you can have the speed but also the security if one of them fail?

If so how?

What is better 3 GTX 285's on 3 way SLI or 2 GTX295's on 2 way SLI?

Are there any extra steps you need to take to install SLI or do you just insert all the cards you need then use the SLI bridge? I have never done it before..

Is there anything I need to know about installing a Core i7 compared to older processors like a Pentium 4? I heard they are Pinless?

THANKS! =]

VERY much appreciated. =]

>> What is better to use.. the motherboards RAID if possible, or is PCI raid better?

Modern motherboard RAID is superior to a PCI raid card... however, I assume you mean the legacy PCI slots. If you're talking PCI Express, then they would be superior. In some cases, to put certain Flash drives in RAID, you might even require the bandwidth of PCIe x4 to get the best results.

>> What steps do you need to take to set up a motherboard RAID for the OS compared to setting up a PCI raid?

The steps are very similar when you excluded the fact that you have to connect the expansion card to the motherboard. Just connect the drives to the RAID card, install the drivers, run the setup utility, etc... it's all explained in documentation.

>> Is it possible to set up RAID 0 and 1 with 3 hard drives so you can have the speed but also the security if one of them fail?
If so how?

You're talking about RAID 1+0 or (even better in my opinion) RAID 5. Google that.

What is better 3 GTX 285's on 3 way SLI or 2 GTX295's on 2 way SLI?

> I haven't seen any benchmark comparisons, but this shouldn't be hard to google. I'm sure one of the popular benchmarking sites have done this. My guess however would be that the 3-way 285s would be superior. However, they both sound like a waste of money.

Are there any extra steps you need to take to install SLI or do you just insert all the cards you need then use the SLI bridge? I have never done it before..

>> Aside from installed SLI drivers and using the nVidia utility to adjust the settings, that's it. It's not nearly as complicated as it seems.

Is there anything I need to know about installing a Core i7 compared to older processors like a Pentium 4? I heard they are Pinless?

> Pinless? No, they're not pinless, and I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say this. They definitely have pins, but there might be something going on there that might spark a concept by that name. Not much to understand about them other than they're multi-core and are capable of hyper-threading. They currently have the best architecture of any retail processor available today and they use a completely different bridge architecture from previous Intel generations. They use a direct path to the RAM similar to the way AMD processors work.