which is better (asus a8n-sli premium or dfi lanparty sli-dr?)

Hey everyone,
ive got a small problem between a choice of two good motherboards.
Choice 1: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Choice 2: DFI Lanparty SLI-DR

Just to tell a little bit about me, i like to overclock my graphic card, although i dont really know much about overclocking other than that. (i.e. im not much into overclocking)
However, im looking for the best motherboard available, preferably for gaming, and without having to tweak, overclock or change any settings.

Please someone help me! Which one is better?

(my cpu specs are
CPU: AMD X2 4400+
GPU: XFX 7800GTX (490/1300)
RAM: 2GB OCZ dual channel LE (2 x 1024) Platinum edition
Motherboard: Which one is better?!)

 

My opinion on motherboards is that it doesn't really matter. As long as you go with a good brand name motherboard (Asus, Abit, MSI, Gigabyte, DFI, and a few others) there is usually very little difference between them. Most of the time the difference in frames per second is like 1 or 2 at the most.

 

halo, i read the first review you gave me on the dfi lanparty, but the second link doesnt work, (the www.hothardware.com one) is it a review on the asus a8n-sli?

 

the link just worked, it says both are about the same, dfi better for overclocking though, which im not thinking of doing, and therefore making me choose the asus 18n-sli premium, thanks for the help!
one last question though, im not looking to for a sli setup any time soon, but just to ask you, is this motherboard the best for single graphic cards as well?

 

western digital caviar 400gb 7200rpm 16mb cache

 

hmm... mabye ill go for the western digital raptor 74gb 10000.
but can u please tell me what this raid thing is, cause ive heard it before and im not sure what it is, is it some sort of control system between the two harddisks?

 

oh halo, one more question, i was looking around on the net, and found that the maxtor diamondmax 10 300gb was about 89 dollars on tiger direct while the western digital 400gb was for around 230 dollars. i looked at both their specs and they apear to be the same....im a little comfused, same performance but less than half the price? what is going on?

 

RAID is running 2 hard drives in well RAID, there is RAID 0 and RAID 1 (newer mobo's have more RAID'ss but you only need to know 0,1) RAID 0 is the best for gamers RAID 0 is data stripping, RAID 1 is Data Mirroring (backing up data form one hardrive to another)

http://techworthy.com/PCUpgrade/JulyAug2004/Setting-Up-An-ATA-RAID-Array.htm?View=Print

http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/

info about RAID

 

"same performance but less than half the price? what is going on?"

You always pay more for the best/fastest/largest. 400Gb is the largest hard drive out right now, other than a couple of 500Gb drives, so you will definitely pay more for the 400Gb drive. It's the same reason the AMD X2 4800+ costs $800 while the AMD X2 4400+ costs $500. There probably isn't a whole lot of difference between them, but you pay much more for the fastest processor out.

RAID 0 is a myth for gaming. There is no real performance gain, don't even bother with it. I have my hard drives running in RAID 0 and my games don't load any faster than anyone of my friend's computers without RAID.

 

so do u think i should run them in raid0? will it work with a western digital 74gb raptor and a western digital 400gb running in raid0? or should i not bother and run them normally.

 

I would agree with wyap there not much performance increase with raid0,it has been proven especially with raptors,one of the most critical numbers to look at when buying a drive is the seek time,as the seek time doesnt increase when running in raid0 from the moment the computer requests the harddrive to find a file to when it finds it in a raptors case 4.5 milisecs,it still takes both HD's 4.5 milisecs to find the file

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

what I have as a compromise is a 10 gig partition on my raptor it has my OS and room for one game whichever I'm playing on ATM this is the fastest portion of the drive I dont put anything else in here,the rest of the drive is partitioned for installing games and progs,every so often I simply copy and paste the entire drive contents to my storage drive labelled F,I have another 10 gig partition on my storage drive with a mirror image of my os so if theres a prob with my raptor install I simply mirror the partition from my stroage drive and I'm back to square one with a perfect clean cop of windows,or if the drive dies I can still use my comp by simply switching the boot order to my storage drive,I have all important family photos and stuff burned to dvd usin In CD if my storage drive dies

 

ok after reading your article it looks like it is not best to go with raid0, and since i dont want to half my capicty, i dont want to use raid 1 either. So that means ill just be using my harddisks normally. In that case i would like to ask you is there any point in buying both harddisks stated in my last message and then installing the os and important apps and gameson the raptor, and then using the 400gb as storage, or should i just buy the 400gb and use that as both for installing and storing? THis is my MAIN concern and question, is there any benefit from doing this if i dont run them in raid, should i buy two?

 

I would say yes, go for both drives. It is always nice to have more than 1 hard drive in your computer. I have 4. I always buy the 120Gb and 160Gb drives that are on sale for $30 or $40 in the weekly Best Buy or OfficeMax ads. But yeah, definitely go for 2 hard drives.

 

thanks alot man, really appreciate it, i think ill go with 2 drives like you said, thanks for all the help!