Need advise about Intel CSA

[MHG]

I am considering both the Asus P4P800-D and the Asus P4C800-E
I Have purchased 1 Gig of Mushkin PC3500 Black and will be using an Audigy 2 soundcard, Leadtek Winfast Xp 2000 Deluxe TV card and possibly an extra Nec USB 2 card due to the lack of of Asus P4P800-D extra USB 2 Riser Brackets along with an ATI 9800 Pro 128Mb video card and 2 Maxtor 160 Gig Serial hard drives hooked up as a Raid 0 on the ICH5/R southbridge.
I am also presently using an Antec TruePower 430 Watt Power supply.
The question is this will I see any benefits using the CSA architechture on the new Canterwood board over the traditional NIC card settup through the PCI Buss on the P4P800-D?
I am using a stand alone computer no router or anything else
using a Motorola Cable Surfboard Modem alomg with Comcast High Speed Cable Running at about 1600Kbs Download and 200Kbs upload speeds.
Also the ECC memory support is not essential.
Any help would be appreciated.
Also of coarse I would wait for a price drop on the newly released Asus P4C800-E.

:confused: :confused:

[pointreyes]

If you have a choice between the P4C800-E and the P4P800 then I suggest you get the P4C800-E. This gets you out of the mess with Intel complaining about PAT enabled in the P4P800 with the potential risk of Intel doing something to stop it (however, I suspect that bios modders will fix whatever Intel trys to break if possible). Then you would also have CSA LAN, however there is very little benefit using CSA LAN if you not transferring files through the NIC at speeds greater than 100Mbs. From what I can tell from your hardware this is currently a non-issue.

[eva2000]

i guess you need at least a gigabit network to take advantage of intel csa ? i have a gigabit network with a netgear gs104s 4 port 10/100/1000 switch, but have no real good testing apps to test the network ..

[pointreyes]

Originally posted by eva2000
i guess you need at least a gigabit network to take advantage of intel csa ? i have a gigabit network with a netgear gs104s 4 port 10/100/1000 switch, but have no real good testing apps to test the network ..

Yeah or even a megabit network. Where the CSA LAN comes in the best is if you are maybe encoding through a network-the sound card on the PCI bus would have to contend with the sharing of the NIC; however with CSA LAN this is not a problem-just like the ICH5R is not a PCI bottleneck problem either. If you consider that a person is working a hard drive at over 100Meg/sec and is sending it through the network while working on something else, you can see the benefit of not having the PCI bus throttle down by a non-CSA NIC. Would be interesting to test though.

[MHG]

Thank You for your help, I have read many complaints in various forums about the lack of CSA and the ICH5/R in the original Asus P4C800-Deluxe board. Most of the concerns stated that filling too many PCI slots would cause a bottleneck slowing things down due to the 133Mhz. bandwidth limitation.
I appreciate you clearing up this issue.