Gigabyte GA-7VRXP http://www.giga-byte.com/products/7vrxp.htm

MSI KT3 ULTRA-ARU http://www.msicomputer.com./product/...3Ultra_aru.htm

Can the raid be used as a regular ide channel on either of these mainboards? Thanks

Yes, I believe so. I have the Giga-byte GA-7DXR and the Promise controller is an ATA/RAID controler. On mine, there is a jumper to select ATA or RAID. When in ATA mode, the extra connectors/slots on the motherboard act as more channels for your hard drives. On mine, I use the regular channels for CD-roms, CDR's DVD, ZIP, etc, and the ATA/RAID channels for hard drives only. When it boots up, it will boot the other devices first then go to anything connected to the Promise controllers. You have to set up the bios to look at the Promise controller. Its called the SCSI/RAID boot device, it has its own heading in bios. Hope this helps, if you need anymore help, just let us know !!

Does the ABIT KR7A-Raid motherboard have this choice also??

Here is the facts from the Abit site.

So yes it does. Here is the link in full to read if you would like...

Abit KR7A-RAID

I have the Abit KR7A-133 and the Raid does work as an extra IDE. I have a 40Gb Maxtor on the IDE 3. Works great.

If there was no option for IDE raid on these boards, you could probably still use sofware RAID (Emulates RAID using CPU instead of hardware) if you are running Windows 2000 or XP.