A couple of questions before I can give a decent answer:

What kind of slot are you going to be using?  PCI-X, PCI-E or PCI?

What level of raid are you looking for, i.e. Raid 1, raid 5, etc?

Sorry it took so long to respond.

For you, I think PCI express is the way to go.  PCI-X is only available on server motherboards, and that will severly limit your performance (overclocking) ability, as well as drive up the price of the system.

Unfortunately, that limits your choices.

From what I can see, on Newegg at least, your choices start at around 439 for This.  That's the cheapest pci-e card with 8 internal sata ports and raid5.

I don't have any experience with Highpoint though.  I have an LSI chipset on my new server motherboard which supports 8 ports, and it's very solid, but I haven't tried the raid features, just hanging a mix of  sas and sata drives on it for the database. I've also used Adaptec in the past with great results.

I'm not sure this helps much, but needing 8 ports puts you well into the server class boards which aren't cheap.

The reviews on that unit would give me pause, but Promise has been around forever and at least USED to make decent products.  Haven't owned one in about 10 years though so I can't speak for their current products.  The price is decent, but sounds like there are some serious issues with the firmware and drivers.

You could look at it two ways as far as future proofing.  A 4 port card now, and a second one (if?) when needed (maybe even a better one by the time it is needed) might be better than a single 8 port card.  Might be cheaper too, at least to start off with.

PCI-X is a server host bus.  There are 775 boards that have them, but again, they're server based boards and tend to me more expensive and less flexible than the consumer based boards.