Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe & PCI-X

[ddocksta]

I am wanting to build a system that uses the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe &
Adaptec SCSI Card 29320A. The adaptec is PCI-X, and the ASUS mobo has
a PCI Express slot in it. Can someone tell me if the two will work
together.

 

[Mercury]

nope. 'e' is a serial protocl, 'x' is a parallel protocol.

The 'x' card should work degraded in a stock PCI slot.

 

[ddocksta]

how much performance loss will I sustain putting it in a stock pci
slot? The PCI-X cards can handle 320 Mbytes of data....the regular
cards can handle 160. I am wondering if it is even worth to try to go
SCSI.

damon

 

[Robert Hancock]

how much performance loss will I sustain putting it in a stock pci
slot? The PCI-X cards can handle 320 Mbytes of data....the regular
cards can handle 160. I am wondering if it is even worth to try to go
SCSI.

damon

It depends, how many drives will be connected to this controller? On the
regular PCI bus, the bandwidth is limited to 133 MB/sec maximum, plus
it'll be sharing with whatever bandwidth is used by other PCI cards, the
Marvell LAN and the Silicon Image SATA controller. With the performance
loss from that, I think you'll be better off with SATA drives on the
NVIDIA controller.

Also, it's possible that other obstructions on the board will block a
PCI-X card from being inserted (because the 64-bit extension part will
be hanging past the edge of the slot).

 

[Ben Pope]

how much performance loss will I sustain putting it in a stock pci
slot? The PCI-X cards can handle 320 Mbytes of data....the regular
cards can handle 160.

The PCI bus limits you to 133MB/s.

I don't know what else is on the same PCI bus as the slot you'd be
using, but probably all the other slots, at a minimum.

I suspect the Marvell Ethernet and SiI SATA controller are elsewhere.

I am wondering if it is even worth to try to go SCSI.

Depends... something like a Raptor will perform similarly to SCSI for a
desktop machine, but if you're doing e.g., RAID5 with 4 15KRPM SCSI
discs and running a database with hundreds of simultaneous users, then I
think you might notice the difference.

Ben