I don't see how this will have any effect on SCSI at all.
So this board can control 12 IDE devices, get the right kind of SCSI card and it alone can control 16.
We all know that ATA is coming towards the end of it's life anyway, Serial-ATA is the next step for the "IDE" interface, ATA-133 being a complete waste of everybody's time and money.
 
It's a nice idea from ABit, get as much on the motherboard as possible, but another question has to be at what cost?
How much is this motherboard going to cost?
How many people need the ability to control 12 IDE devices?
Nice enough idea, but I look at this board as a bit of hype over nothing really amazing and as for it's effect on SCSI, nothing really.

i agree with Bladerunner.
If Abit wants to be on the bleeding edge than lets see a IDE Raid 5.
For me I'm making that move to SCSI (slooowly) just because it is about as future proof as you can get in hardware.
ZEHN

I definatly agree with BladeRunner but still SCSI is very expensive, this is the only reason i wont move to SCSI. Don't think many people would take advantage of 12 Devices on a desktop PC but maybe on a server thats looking to use a lot of hard drives.

Abit has gone raid nuts that for sure, That board it self s@ck all ready oh and consumers definitely don't need RAID nor they need on board Audio, Ethernet controller, Firewire controller.
I just love how they say it Legacy-Free then what h@ll is the floppy doing on the board??.

Ah i couldnt care less how many IDE connectors it has, as long as its got at least 2. I still need a floppy so its welcome, but im pleased to see they have got rid of all the other legacy stuff. I know some people still use them but i have no use for such things and im sure other people are in the same position, so well done abit for actually going ahead and doing it.
 
As far as raid goes, a while back i thought, wow raid yeah ill have that. Most pointless thing i have ever used, unless you spend most of you life benchmarking your drives there is no difference
 
Anyway....

I disagree. I have noticed a definite performance boost with RAID 0. While a single 7200RPM ATA100 drive does load stuff like Unreal Tournament and other Unreal-based games faster, I can still notice the speed from 2 7200RPM ATA100 drives in RAID 0. And gaming isn't the only thing that's loading faster, Windows does as well. I don't have any other really big loading programs, but the extra speed can't hurt any.

I like the Raid because my setup is as follows(main system)
DVD-master ide1
burner-master ide2
zip 100-slave ide2
 
ibm gxp60/20G-master ide raid 1 (ntfs)(striped)
ibm gxp60/20G-master ide raid 2 (ntfs)(striped)
ibm gxp60/20G-slave ide raid 2 (fat32)
 
sure my pci slots are not full but i can add things as i need them at will. i have so much more "built-in" headroom than just the normal ide setup.
now this is just my set-up and works very good for me. I still want a duel chip so bad i can tast it but that is a story not told to children to go to bed to.
 
ZEHN

Brian in order to make full use raid you need run it like server or be capture Uncompressed AVI plases don't say your game load fast, Raid is best use on write side not the read side.

I'm a happy RAID user.
I have 4x 60GB HD's in a RAID 0+1 array.
However, the main reason for this setup is the redundency it offers, any one HD can fail, most combinations of two, and my data will still be very safe and I can continue to use my PC whilst replacements are found.
The fact that my RAID 0+1 array on Promise TX2 also increases performance is really just a by-product.

Well what you say is true, SHS, I still can tell a very noticeable difference with RAID 0 in loading certain games. It's not as big of a difference from a single 7200RPM drive, but when I originally did this, I was running a single 5400RPM drive. I'm not trying to argue here, but I just know it's very fast.