Is a MOBO with seperate IDE Channels important??

[scores4film]

In my mobo research I\'ve narrowed it down to either a Asus p4pe for intel processor or an Asus a7n8x for athlon. The p4pe has a faster bus speed, but only 1 IDE channel. The Asus board has two IDE channels. How important is it to have seperate IDE channels?? I will be streaming from 2 seperate 120 gig West Dig drives.

Thanks,

Colin

[Bill]

Having two channels is crucial.

AND... the P4PE not only has two channels, but Serial ATA as well.

[clueless]

Don\'t the IDE channels come off the PCI buss whether or not they are built in? If they do communicate through PCI, then you lose nothing by getting a system with one channel buit in and adding a PCI/IDE card for additional channels. The question is whether my statement is still true for P4 machine architectures. Does anyone know?

Clueless

[Sam]

I\'ve never seen a board with just 1 IDE controller. I\'m too lazy to look at the Asus site but at newegg.com it looks like all the p4pe\'s have 2 IDE controllers.

The PCI bus has plently of bandwidth for GSt and lots more, I wouldn\'t worry about it. I run GSt on a promise PCI card, no problems. Also I don\'t know that all IDE drives are always on the PCI bus, I would guess it isn\'t implemented that way for example on the 815 chipset, which bridges many independent busses with PCI just one of them. Not sure, but I\'m sure it\'s a non issue with GS.

[Scott Cairns]

I\'ve never seen a board with just 1 IDE controller. I\'m too lazy to look at the Asus site but at newegg.com it looks like all the p4pe\'s have 2 IDE controllers.<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I agree, I\'m not sure that you can even buy a board with one IDE controller. Mobo\'s have at the very least had a primary and secondary IDE channel. This gives you 2 master devices and two slaves.

Scott.

[Hudson]

You can also get the P4PE with the Raid option and use that as an extra IDE channel. But as others have pointed out, you shouldn\'t see any performance probs with a ATA PCI card. FWIW, I\'ve been looking at the P4PE, too, and people are just raving about the board.
-Hudson


Originally posted by Bill:
Having two channels is crucial.

AND... the P4PE not only has two channels, but Serial ATA as well. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">