Re: motherboard decision help

fred smith wrote:

Hmm. I see that on newegg it's $107. There's also one named GA 7N400-L
that looks pretty similar for about 30 bucks less, perhaps that's the
cheaper model to which you refer... know anything about it?

The GA 7N400-L is basically the same mobo, without the SATA, the RAID, Dual Bios, and the IEEE1394 (firewire). It also uses a RealTek 8100C instead of the 8169 (GigaBit). The 400 Pro2 has 4 PATA interfaces, where the 400-L only has 2.

Re the GA-7N400 Pro2 that you discuss above, one thing I've always
wondered about these boards with onboard RAID,... is it possible to attach additional drives to the RAID cable sockets and use them as
ordinary (i.e., NON-RAID) drives? So that we could have more than four
IDE drives on the system? The SATA is of no immediate use to me, I have
no SATA drives and no prospect of buying any in the foreseeable future.
(In fact I've a surplus of ATA drives already, with several in the range
of 8-40 gigs lying on the "spare parts" shelf at the moment.)

Yes, you can disable the RAID function in BIOS. If you need more than 2 PATA's, you might want to go with the 7N400 Pro2, which has 2 SATA's and 4 PATA's.

http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/ComparisonSheet_ChipsetType_nForce2+Ultra400.htm