AMD Athlon 64 3400 with K8V-X or K8N?

J

j0hn00

New Member
I'm thinking about buying the AMD Athlon 64 3400 for $227 with either the ASUS K8V-X or the K8N. The main difference I can see with these two are that the K8V-X uses the K8T800 + VT8237 HyperTransport, while the K8N uses the NVIDIA nForce3 250. Both are $84.50. Can anyone recommend one over the other?

I would have liked to gone with the Socket 939s, but the cost of the CPU/MoBo combo is a bit too much for me.

One other thing, I don't really play games or do any multimedia processing. I just need something stable with a little speed.

Nevermind... I went with the K8N.
 
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K8N all the way ... not just because its not a part of the -X series but because the K8T800 sux0rs :D
 
I have another question for you then... I've read the online manual, tried to Google it, still no luck. Is the onboard RAID only for SATA drives? Or will they work on PATA drives also? I would like to use RAID 0, because I've read that it'll be faster than the separate drive setup I was planning on.
 
Page IX states it as
K8V-X Manual said:
2 x UltraATA 133 connectors
2 x SATA with RAID 0, RAID 1
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You are quite correct as noting that the RAID only supports the SATA drive

If you read further on, Section 3-8 it tells you bluntly that the RAID is for the two SATA lines :)
 
Actually, I was referring to the K8N. In the manual I downloaded from Asus, it does refer to the SATA drives, but further searching through Google also implied that PATA was supported. My problem is that I'm still unable to get a solid answer to my question.
 
Actually, I was referring to the K8N. In the manual I downloaded from Asus, it does refer to the SATA drives
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Well the K8N shouldnt give any confusion as it's both...... (and if you look at page 16 you'll note that there are no "dedicated" RAID connectors). Sections 2-18 through 2-20 give hint about the JBOD/SpannedRAID configuration.

A bit of research yields http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_raid.html which should explain everything :)

In the manual I downloaded from Asus, it does refer to the SATA drives
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What page? I found the comment about RAID0+1/JBOD but it did not say explicitly SATA RAID.... :confused:
 
On page 2-19, it lists:

RAID Option ROM [Disabled]
Allows you to enable or disable the onchip NVIDIA Serial ATA boot ROM

Then lists some options if the RAID Option ROM were enabled. This is the only area in the manual where the RAID function is discussed. Anyway, the only reason I wanted to use RAID 0 is because I've read that it would be faster than a single PATA drive. And since I don't have any SATA drives, I wanted to decrease the bottleneck that my PATA drives would create by just a bit.

I should be getting my new motherboard on Tuesday, so I'll know for sure then. Thanks.
 
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Actually on 2-19 and 2-20 (2-18 above was a typo), if you read, there's a bunch of options:
Primary Master as RAID
Primary Slave as RAID
Secondary Master as RAID
Secondary Slave as RAID
Third Master as RAID
Fourth Master as RAID

Which lets you see the possibilities of cross interfaced RAIDing
 
You know what, I thought that IDE just meant "cable". I just realized IDE is in reference to PATA drives. Because the manual layout was:

RAID Option ROM [Disabled]
Allows you to enable or disable the onchip NVIDIA Serial ATA boot ROM
*The following items appear only when RAID Option ROM item is Enabled.
Primary Master as RAID
Enables or disables the use of the Primary IDE Master as RAID

and also because of the asterisk, I thought all of it was referring to SATA drives. Now I know I can use my two PATA drives as RAID 0. One final question though... I've read that I should split my two HDDs as primary master and secondary master on separate IDE cables when using RAID. Since I only have two IDE ports, I will be putting my two ODDs as slaves. With independent device timing and all, this shouldn't affect the speed of the HDDs at all, right? Once again, thanks for all your help.
 
Now I know I can use my two PATA drives as RAID 0.
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You can use any combination of the drives as RAID0 :)

I've read that I should split my two HDDs as primary master and secondary master on separate IDE cables when using RAID. Since I only have two IDE ports, I will be putting my two ODDs as slaves. With independent device timing and all, this shouldn't affect the speed of the HDDs at all, right?
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Ok so how many HDDs are we working with?
 
I got all my parts and built my computer last night. I'm pretty sure the RAID is in conjunction with SATA drives. Basically, if you don't have at least one SATA drive, the IDE RAID is useless. After a few hours of trying to get it to work properly, I gave up. Eventually, I just put the two HDDs on the primary IDE and the two ODDs on the secondary IDE. Everything works fine and I can't believe how fast the Athlon 64 3400+ is. It took just over 10 minutes to install Windows. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you Praetor for all your help on the various questions I've been asking around the forum.
 
2 x Seagate 120gb 72k 8mb
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Yes but what type of drives are these?

I'm pretty sure the RAID is in conjunction with SATA drives. Basically, if you don't have at least one SATA drive, the IDE RAID is useless
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Quite possible. The description of the NF3 is that "you can combine PATA and SATA together to make RAID" however they say nthing about not having SATA however again if you tinker around with the stuff from 2-18 and 2-19 from the manual you should be able to get RAID going.... not that RAID helps that much or anythng

It took just over 10 minutes to install Windows. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you Praetor for all your help on the various questions I've been asking around the forum.
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No matter how fast the CPU is ... you're still limited by the speed of the optical drive .... 10 minutes is quite a stretch. Glad to help though :)
 
All my HDDS are PATA IDE ATA100 drives, the ones most users have.

As for the RAID, I can initially set it up but I get an error telling me that no boot drive is detected once I leave the RAID menu. After a restart, no PATAs are detected but the RAID function in post detects them. Again, that's as far it will go before it hangs and says no boot drive is detected. I realized that the RAID is intended with use with SATAs when I noticed the RAID menu will not initialize without the SATA RAID ROM Option enabled.

How is 10 minutes a stretch? It used to take me 40 minutes on my XP 2100+.

Anyway, I'm quite happy with my new computer. In the next few months, I plan to limit the bottleneck by replacing the AGP card and possibly switching to SATA drives, maybe even getting a DVD-R.
 
How is 10 minutes a stretch? It used to take me 40 minutes on my XP 2100+.
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Because you gotta stop and fill out stuff and stuff needs to be detected and more stuff... its not CPU bound :)
 
I was referring to the actual installing. Basically after that first reboot when the formatting and copying of files has already been done. My bad.
 
I was referring to the actual installing. Basically after that first reboot when the formatting and copying of files has already been done. My bad.
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Installation starts from "Press any key to boot from CD" until you finish booting to a usable state the first time doesnt it?
 
Like I said, my bad. Starting from the "Press...", I guess my installation time was about an hour then. The formatting took forever.
 
No, it was a brand new drive. I don't think it gave me the option of a quick format. Doesn't matter, what's done is done. As long as everything's working.
 
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