NForce 4 support?

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

I'm trying to chose a sane board for my next machine but easy it ain't.
Aside of the issue that I can't really make up my mind if I should pay
the PCI Express premium (tend to say I probably have to) the fact that I
won't accept a fan on the board doesn't exactly help.

Aside of a few rare Via K8T890 boards (most notably Albatron K8X890 Pro
II which even got Via Envy24 sound on board [1]), only NForce 4 seems to
be a viable option (ATI's Unix support has traditionally been pretty
lacking I doubt I want one of their new chipsets). So I'm wondering what
the state on NForce SATA support is these days (and the same on VT8237
for that matter), can I use the pseudo RAID in there?

I was thinking about this particular board (I'd prefer MSI over Gigabyte
but ALAS, MSI has a Northbridge fan on it):
http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-K8NF-9.htm#


[1] But I can't find a shop that actually carries it in Switzerland. And
importing it from Germany is way too expensive.



PS: the usual "AMD is da suxors" suspects need not apply.