PCI bus overloading

[Squigmont]

I'm running an Asus A8V Deluxe w/ 2GB and an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor. I
have a RAID1 array on the onboard Promise FastTrak SATA RAID controller
(which uses the PCI bus) and a Creative X-Fi sound card.

The only reason that I had initially chosen the Promise controller rather
than the Via 8237 chipset SATA RAID controller for my RAID1 array was
because my PCMark 2004 hard disk performance score was about 175 points
(~4%) higher using the Promise controller. (That was before Santa brought me
the X-Fi card and got me to thinking about the PCI bus load.)

Could my current configuration be slowing me down by overloading the PCI
bus? Would I be better off hooking up my RAID1 array drives to the Via 8237
chipset SATA RAID controller, thereby removing that load from the PCI bus?

 

[Conor]

I'm running an Asus A8V Deluxe w/ 2GB and an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ processor. I
have a RAID1 array on the onboard Promise FastTrak SATA RAID controller
(which uses the PCI bus) and a Creative X-Fi sound card.

The only reason that I had initially chosen the Promise controller rather
than the Via 8237 chipset SATA RAID controller for my RAID1 array was
because my PCMark 2004 hard disk performance score was about 175 points
(~4%) higher using the Promise controller. (That was before Santa brought me
the X-Fi card and got me to thinking about the PCI bus load.)

Could my current configuration be slowing me down by overloading the PCI
bus? Would I be better off hooking up my RAID1 array drives to the Via 8237
chipset SATA RAID controller, thereby removing that load from the PCI bus?

PCI Latency is the big issue. There's some good articles about it on
the net as well as the PCI Latency Tool which is good for setting them.