I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H mobo that I think is producing a whine. My system (Antec Sonata Designer case with Earthwatts 500W PSU and stock fans, AMD 4850e CPU with stock cooler and fan, 4GB Crucial RAM, WD GP 750GB, Samsung/Pioneer DVD drives) is otherwise remarkably quiet. But when my speaker...

My Antec Sonata Designer 500 came with three internal 3.5" suspension mounts for hard drives and has another four external 5.25" drive bays. I believe there are also some cheaper versions of the same case under the name Solo or Sonata that don't include the PSU if you wanted to bring your own. I'm p...

I put everything together over the weekend and am quite pleased. I went with almost exactly the configuration from my original post, except that I ended up getting 4GB of RAM (because it was only $20 more than 2GB) and getting the Pioneer 216 RW drive instead of the Optiarc ROM drive as y'all recomm...

Those are just the answers I wanted to hear. I'm going to go with the Samsung PATA drive and the Pioneer SATA, which will leave me 4 SATA ports for hard drives and hopefully allow me to do on-the-fly drive-to-drive copies (at least of CDs). And I'll go with the stock Antec and AMD fans (and heatsink...

We've devolved a bit into the CD burning world, but this is highly educational. So if I want to use the dual drives to copy one disc to another, is it better to have two SATA drives or one SATA and one PATA? Meanwhile, back on the topic of keeping things cool and quiet... With the Gigabyte board and...

You need to pay attention to true burn quality rather than paper spec. Samsung is known for good single layer burning and mediocre dual layer burning. Get a Pioneer 116 or 216 to complement Samsung's drawbacks. Btw, you could go for www.cdfreaks.com for further information. I owned 7 DVD writers fo...

Some questions: From the pics and specs of the motherboard it looks like it has 8 SATA ports, gigabit ethernet, firewire, and digital audio output, right? Are the audio/USB/firewire ports on the front panel of the case hooked up? Are the DVI ports on the video card DVI-I or DVI-D? If I get the monit...

A bit of topic, but why would you want to purchase a DVD-ROM? DVD writer is dirt cheap in recent days. Get 2 different writers to complement the deficiency that individual writers hold. Interesting point. What deficiencies would that Samsung have that I'd need to remedy? It has dual-layer support, ...

I have no need for SLI. I merely chose the SLI Asus board because it seemed to be reasonably priced and met my other requirements (gigabit ethernet, firewire, lots of SATA ports). If its NVidia chipset is going to run hotter than the 780g on the Gigabyte board, though, it sounds like it's not worth ...

I'm planning my first build and the top priorities are keeping cost and noise to a minimum. Performance is less of a priority. I'm not a gamer, so I'm perfectly happy with a mid-range CPU and GPU. I just want something that'll last me a few years and make Aero run smoothly, leave room to add more ha...

OP, did you ever make a decision?