i have a gigabyte ga-k8ns ultra 939 motherboard. it comes with 2 sata controllers. one is silicon image and the other is nvidia (i think its the one on the chipset). which one would be better to use as far as not lagging up the system and the one with less probelms?

dot.

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Dot...the nvidia sata controller is located on the nividia chip and therefore doesn't require an additional system bus, PCI-x lane or IRQ assignment to the cpu to communicate, whereas the silicon image controller is independant of the chipset and MB controller functions and does require there to be some form of additional open communication to the cpu VIA the nvidia chip, one more link in the chain = slower response, although it's probably so small as to be unnoticable...but, I know that one of the sata controllers will lock at a certain speed and the other one won't, which is not a problem as long as you're running stock speeds for your CPU and memory. If you overclock and are using the unlockable controller, that controller will want to follow the processing increase and could lead to errors and malfunctioning, and I don't recall which is which, sorry... perhaps you could check on another forum to find this out, heres a link to Overclockers Forums' ">http://www.ocforums.com/index.php, that should get you going...happy computing...

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