If you're building a new system and are planning to use SATA drives then the 955X7AA has plenty on offer. On top of the four SATA devices that the Intel chipset offer there's an additional Silicon Image controller that adds support for another four devices. In addition there's dual Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet contollers - one on the PCI Express bus and one PCI bus - as well as FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 support. That's not a bad set of features and the latest FireWire technology could be particularly useful if you need to shift a lot of large chunks of data using something like this external Maxtor FireWire 800 drive.



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