So vanilla ICH5 does or doesnt...

Support RAID 0 in WinXP Pro? Im considering getting a couple (hopefully) 2nd ed. 36GB Raptors from Newegg and striping them with my IC7's ICH5.

On the Abit site it reads that the IC7 supports RAID 0, but I've read elsewhere the ICH5 does not support RAID 0.

I've also read that the ICH5 sucks CPU usage like woah (heard up to 50%). I am a gamer and it only makes sense that it shouldn't make a difference because the major HD usage is while loading maps, etc. The only hit I would take while playing a game is if the game sucked RAM and I needed to use the swap file a lot? Am I correct?

Thanks for any help you guys can give me!

You must have the ICH5-R in order to support RAID in hardware. If you don't have the R, then you will need to buy some form of outboard PCI raid card or else another motherboard. You can also do a software raid 0, but only on a storage drive (ie not the drive that contains the OS -- physically not possible )

Albuquerque said:

You must have the ICH5-R in order to support RAID in hardware. If you don't have the R, then you will need to buy some form of outboard PCI raid card or else another motherboard. You can also do a software raid 0, but only on a storage drive (ie not the drive that contains the OS -- physically not possible )

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this brings up a good point. since the ICH5(R) supposedly sucks up a lot of CPU power, which would be better? RAID on the ICH5R or on a PCI card? if its on a PCI card, wouldnt it relieve the CPU from being worked too hard? the question is, would it be slower (bottlenecked) on a PCI card versus the onboard ICH5R?

The whole point of ICH5R is RAID is Native to the chipset and has it's own dedicated bandwidth. Using a 3rd party controller built-in the board or using a PCI raid card use the PCI bus which is bottlenecked. This factor is much more important than CPU cycles.

I also recall seeing the ICH5R doing better in benchmarks, and on a relatively recent CPU (2.4C or higher) the usage is less than 10% under the most extreme circumstances. Not a big deal anyway, as the cpu utilization will only happen during huge IO reads and not during actual gameplay (unless you're somehow flat out of memory and are paging the machine to death -- just like you mentioned earlier)

Yeah, the ICH5R does do better in benchmarks than other onboard sata controllers. Raptor benches on these have better benchies than say my NF7-S' onboard sata controller(SI),

Thanks for the info guys! Guess I'll have to stop crying now and pick myself up a Adaptec card

Renigade said:

Thanks for the info guys! Guess I'll have to stop crying now and pick myself up a Adaptec card

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Why? Use the ICH5R that is on your board... The fastest solution for SATA raid available.

nikhsub1 said:

Why? Use the ICH5R that is on your board... The fastest solution for SATA raid available.

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Could it be that, just as he was describing in this very thread, he doesn't have an ICH5R on his board? Just a wild guess

Albuquerque said:

Could it be that, just as he was describing in this very thread, he doesn't have an ICH5R on his board? Just a wild guess

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AFAIK, all IC7's have ICH5R... I had 2 of them, heck even the IS7 has it.