Whoa. Do you play guitar? Because an iAXE USB Guitar with your computer as an amp would be amazing.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/avcards/8c43/

That could be fun... actually, I use it with my drumpad for MIDI work

If you want to use your PC as an amp get a pedal with a USB connection...I have an RP-250 it is so much fun. http://www.digitech.com/products/RP_newpgs/rp250.htm

couple of quick questions.
I am wanting to buy a laptop, would I see a difference in battery life and performance between a 7200RPM Drive and a 5400RPM Drive?

Also, I am thinking of possibly upgrading my desktop. The major thing though is if I can avoid it, I don't want to buy a new HDD or DVD burner. I have a 300GB HDD, and my DVD can burn anything, and has litescribe also. There are IDE drives, do I really need to go SATA on a new computer?

Re laptop: 5400 RPM would have longer battery life and lower performance than a 7200 RPM drive. It *IS* noticeable, but I would favor the extra battery life over the performance, and just get a crapload of RAM (like 2gb) so that I don't need quick access to the hard drive (swap, etc...)

Re SATA: The question is why *not* get SATA? Pretty much all new motherboards have SATA and IDE (some only have 1 IDE (2 devices), some have 2 (4 devices)) - but then you can keep using your old IDE hdd and dvd burner while preventing yourself from limiting your upgrade options in the future. But somehow I don't think this is what you meant. Now if your question is whether or not you should buy a new SATA drives to replace your old IDE drives, then no. The performance will be identical. I only urge people to get SATA when they are buying a drive because it is so much easier to work with.

thanks, that is very helpful. I do plan on 2GB RAM with the machine anyways.

I will hold onto the old drives then (save some money really, and I can upgrade those later on down the line).

Well, there isn't a hard drive on the market that can actually saturate a UDMA 100 IDE connection, so its not so much an UPGRADE going from IDE to SATA. You do gain SOME features, though, like NCQ and hot-swapping, but if you don't use those, there really isn't any reason to replace them until they are dead (or you replace your dvd burner with a blue-ray/HD DVD burner ) - the hard drive you might as well hold onto until it dies.... Everyone could always use more hard drive space

ok, will do. Now you said some mobo's have only one IDE now, there isn't an issue with an optical drive and an HDD on the same channel, is there?

Not really-ish. The catch is that only ONE can be accessed at a time, so if you try to use them both at the same time, they will basically be running slower than if each was on its own IDE channel. You probably won't notice a difference, though. Don't worry, you can still use both simultaneously, so you can, for example, still install from the DVD drive to the hard drive, its just that it will theoretically take longer (not sure what the practical limitations are). I doubt as to whether or not you will even notice, however.

ok, thanks for that, but I think I will still go for dual IDE, as once in a while I slave an extra HDD to back it up (happens when your HDD is larger than all the other internal in the house combined). Also, another major reason is then I can have the HDD and optical farther apart.

Ok, current price is about 1610 dollars, which I think will be fine. I spent the 15 bucks to upgrade to a 5600 from a 5200 and also got an anti-static strap. Lastly, apparently the sound on the mobo sucks so I might get a cheap sound card (something like one of these). Kllr, you said you have this motherboard, have you had any problems with the sound?


I plan on ordering in about 10 days and right now the ram and dvd burners are sold out

EDIT: Awww shit.... I wish I had been able to order yesterday or something... (I was out of town so it would have been impossible, but still....) Not only do all of the 3 mail in rebates end today (2 cosair 1 evga) but the 27-29 were sales tax free days in Tennessee so I could have saves 150 bucks =\

On the sound card issue - do NOT get a cheap card. It will sound worse than the onboard. I personally didn't like the onboard sound (I could hear just a bit of static that annoyed me) and switched back to my Audigy. I recommend getting an X-Fi (any of them - they all sound amazing - even the 'low-end' X-Fi Music), or if you want to use it in linux also, an Audigy 2 ZS.

But hey, you can always just try the onboard yourself and see if it works for you.

I have a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum myself... It's AWESOME, except for the fact that it is completely linux noncompliant... Creative won't give ALSA a datasheet, and it's a completely new architecture...

Creative claims to be making linux drivers though, wtih an ETA of second quarter 2007... but I doubt it will happen...

I was thinking either the 55 dollar one or 75 dollar one, but the 180 dollar one has a 50 dollar rebate on it right now, so it is about the same price as one level below it... hmmm....

Any other good, but relatively cheap, sound cards?

Not that I can think of. Just the Audigy 2 ZS.

Do you mean the one designed for notebooks or the 130 dollar one?

If you aren't building a laptop (which this topic isn't dealing with), why the hell would I recommend the one for LAPTOPS? Come on man, use that pink matter between your ears, I'm sure you have at least SOME Since the audigy 2 ZS isn't really available anymore, I was more suggesting that in terms of finding it on ebay or used - hence why it would be cheap If you are buying new, get an X-Fi - no reason not to.

Also, please refer to them by their NAMES and not their prices, as prices tend to change, and names are a whole lot easier to remember than prices

Ok, I saw a 100 dollar one at my local office depot store on clearance recently, I think it was an audigy or x-fi, I will check next time I go. I think I might have also seen one of the usb sound cards that they make...

I will not order the sound card when I order the rest, I am going to see how I feel about the sound first.

can't refer to names for this post because I am really not sure what they are =P

P.S. the reason I thought the laptop one might be it is because it was the only one there and I thought that their might be a port somewhere on the motherboard where I could put it, but I would have needed to check that

ew, avoid USB sound cards. Those, too, are mainly for laptops, and won't sound as good as a regular ol' PCI card. You might be just fine with the onboard sound, but good luck getting it working OK in linux I wasn't able to, although I didn't really try all that much, and I have heard reports of people having success with it just fine, so it'll probably be plug n' play on Ubuntu

My onboard sound works flawlessly in Ubuntu