Well I was in a way I just added new larger capacity high perfomance hard drives and decided to try the silicon RAID card but as that was not so successful I decided to go with the Matrix raid as you pointed out I could use different RIADs which worked out well.
I did try to restore the backup image but had trouble booting it I think due to the different RAID controller from that which was saved on the backup image.
Now I have it nearly back to full operation except maybe a few virtuals which are no trouble to restor as I have the vm drives on the backup. I would rather troubleshoot the video card issue than the RAID, at least I can operate the server labs again.