raid 5 on 975x (ICH7R)

[T-Minus10]

On the ICH7R, different 'raid partitions' can be made over drives. My current set up is:
MSI 975X Platinum Power-Up Edition (Intel 975x chipset / ICH7R)
4x 250gb Samsung Spinpoint
1x 500gb Seagate 7200.10

My plan is to split the 4 up into two 'raid partitions' one raid 5 for critical data (o/s, documents) and one raid0 for high-performance data (games, swap files).

My question:

Setting everything up will take a good while. The inquirer reports raid issues with conroe chips.
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=32842
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32818

form-goers claim otherwise
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1073207

does anyone have benchmarks?

GamePC reviews the ich7r w/ the 955x chipset
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raid505&page=3

but it doesn't a) use the 975x chipset and b) address these (probably bogus) slowdown allegations.

furthermore, I haven't seen any reviews of "matrix storage technology" from outside of intel. Will making multiple raid partitions cause unreasonable slowdowns/cpu hikes?

Thanks for your input. Assuming noone warns me, I'm going ahead with my plans and I'll post some benchmarks in a week or so.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Matrix raid is not very helpful, especially with the OS on one partition and games/swap on the other. If the OS stuff and the games are getting read at the same time the disk will be making large seeks between the two ends of the drive, which hurts performance a lot. Just my $.02.