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#11
Alphanumeric, I'm a AMD man myself and love my MSI board. Just beginning to change my case out with a new one and go water cooling. CPU temp's should fall handly. Waiting for Sata 6 SSD's to come out and then fall in price. I'm so happy with my Phenom 2.6 black, it fly's with a modest 10% OC.
lol, the only Intel PC in the house is my daughters netbook with an Atom processor.
My first AMD rig had an MSI motherboard. We've had Durons, Athlons, Athlon XP's, and now an Athlon II that will be upgraded to a Phenom II. These days I've been really keen on finding a true legacy free motherboard. I know you can turn all that stuff off but why have it there in the first place if your never going to use it. I'd much rather have more expansion slots and a cleaner look.
lol, on my newest rig, the case still has all the original blank panels in it. Aside from two USB ports and the front panel audio jacks that came with it it's blank. No floppy drive, no optical drive, and no media card reader, nada. I might put a DVD-ROM in it at some point. I have an external USB DVD-RW that I use if I have too. I use USB flash drives for just about everything these days.
EDIT: The lol was me laughing at me not you. Nice system. :)
I'm an audiophile so the need for the drives was to transfer 1800 cd's to lossless which resides on one of the (3) 1TB drives internal with 2.5 TB esata drives as back up. The vinyl collection will be coming at some time but transferring at real time and adding all the track data has me less than thrilled but in the audio world don't kill me but analog has always ruled.
My previous rig had a DVD-ROM and a DVD-RW in it. All my other PC's have at least a CD or DVD drive in them. At one time I used to copy and burn a lot of CD's and DVD's. I very seldom need an optical drive these days so I decided to go with an external LightScribe drive. It comes in handy for my daughters netbook too. If I was doing what you are doing I'd want one or more fast internal optical drives too.
Yeah that's the big question, fast! I'm just now learning to investigate the speed of these components. My opticals where both under 30 bucks USD. Maybe I need to raise this bar. I also want an SSD but I'm waiting for both Sata 6g and USB 3 to settle in and then the prices to drop to make my move. Two other area's where I'm looking here to learn. 1) Raid set up ! 2) Manual OC ! I'm happy with letting the Mobo just 10% the cpu at the moment if I try to push 15% it reboots to stock and I wonder if learning to manually push the cpu/ram/gpu would net me a safe and sane improvement. All in all I think I should just leave well enough alone !! Any thoughts on this ?
I've played around with RAID 0, two IDE drives, and found it more trouble than it's worth with no noticeable improvement in speed. I personally wouldn't try it again unless I could run RAID 5 with at least 3 drives. I'm not big on overclocking. I need my gear to last as long as it can, so I don't stress my stuff. Lots of people do it and more "power" to them, I'm just not one of them. :)