Hardware trouble and future

A few days ago, my RAID1 started to fall apart. I’m using a ASUS A8N-SLI Premium mainboard with the nForce 4 SLI chipset. Sadly, this chipset is not worth its money. The nVidia LAN firewall is simply broken, and the RAID controller is unreliable - what could be worse for a RAID controller. Read on for some ramblings about what will hopefully become my next PC. I’m planning to switch over to a brand new machine mid/end next year, and although I was looking forward to use a nVidia chipset as I’ve been satisfied with the performance so far, I think that Intel is gonna make it this time. Especially if it really turns out to be a Core Quadro (recently reviewed on Tom’s Hardware) which looks like a very good platform for development.

Some other things which are pretty sure is that I’ll go for 4+ GiB of RAM and a RAID5 system. The RAID1 has been so far unsatisfying, performance wise it’s ok but that’s it basically, and a RAID5 should give me a nive performance edge at the same data safety level. I have doubts AMD/ATI will come up with a competitive solution which is also reliable. After the adventures I had with my current rig (which was by then cutting-edge technology from AMD/nVidia) I’ll wait at least 6 months until the Intel quad core has matured a bit. If AMD comes with a quad core out at a similar time as Intel, they can make it, otherwise they’ll miss my time frame and I’m really not willing to risk buying “beta” class hardware again.