PCI ATA100 controller VS. OnBoard ATA100

[Serpico74]

I am swapping over to a new mobo (either the Epox 8K7A or MSI K7 Master) very soon.

I need more than two IDE slots because of the number of devices that are in my computer.

Unfortunately the K7 Master only comes in a plain IDE configuration or one with SCSI. The Epox 8K7A with RAID (which would suit my needs) is a bit hard to find locally at the moment.

What I was wondering is if I should even worry about this and get a Promise ATA controller card instead? So far I have only used onboard ATA controllers for more than 4 devices. Is there a difference in performance having the controller in a PCI slot vs on the mobo?

Thx

 

[mk52]

nope all the same

-MeliK

 

[SocrPlyr]

the onboard ones literally use the pci bus... they are just directly connected to it through traces on the mobo instead of the pci slot... no difference as has already been mentioned
Josh

 

[bacillus]

should be the same performance though the controller card does use 1 pci slot!

 

[AndyHui]

No performance difference.

Onboard saves you a slot, but you can't upgrade.

PCI Card uses up that slot, but it's upgradeable.

 

[Madcowz]

Actually certain ATA100 controller's do show slight performance increases. In fact my Promise Ultra 100 card get's 15% higher benchmarks than the onboard ATA100 on my CUSL2