Hardware installation Questions

[cyberdad]

I am getting ready to purchase an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe mother board and have a qouple of nooby questions. I am getting ready to put a new rig together, using some of my old components. I will be installing Winows XP Home. I have a Pioneer DVD-116 (IDE), and a Yamaha CRW2100E CD-ROM (IDE) that I want to move from my old rig to the new one. I intend to get a new HD something like the Western Digital 120GB SATA hard drive.

Question 1: Is there going to be a problem with this? Can I install the DVD and CD-ROM each on the separate IDE slots? Could i have a conflict here?
Question 2: I want at least 1024 MB memory. What is the best way to go on this?
Question 3: I have researched this board, and believe that it is a good choice, however I have read some horror stories on the various forums. With this board, am I getting into something that I might have trouble handling.

I live in a fairly remote section of Oregon, and good local technical help is almost non-existant. There are a few people around working as technicians, but they appear to run out to the limits of thier experience pretty quick, so except for good forums like this, I am going to be pretty much on my own.

 

[InlineFive]

1. Concerning IDE channels It would be best to have your configuration go like this:
Primary IDE Master: Hard Drive
Primary IDE Slave: Nothing
Secondary IDE Master: CD-RW
Secondary IDE Slave: DVD-ROM
In general you want to try and keep hard drives on their own channel because then they don't have to share a little bit of channel bandwidth with slower drives. And since both of your optical drives don't even meet ATA66 spec together I think that's the best way to go.
2. The best bet for memory is two sticks of 512MB memory because on your motherboard that would give you dual-channel memory. This doubles your bandwidth however there is minimal improvement on Athlon systems. But everything helps!
3. Lots of boards are excellent with occasional duds. I would stick with what you have. I had lots of horror stories about the A7N8X-X not working with Corsair XMS memory and ATI Radeons but guess what?! Mine works just fine with both of those!

Hope this helps! And the Anandtech forums are a great place for tech support. You just keep bumping threads untill you get an answer.

-Por

 

[bendixG15]

There are a few people around working as technicians, but they appear to run out to the limits of thier experience pretty quick, so except for good forums like this, I am going to be pretty much on my own.

That statement applies across America and not just the remote sections of Orergon.

____ Good Luck and Happy Holidays from the East Coast

 

[cyberdad]

Porbleemo, This particular board has SATA headers that I had planned on connecting my SATA hard drive. It has two Serial ATA headers and two IDE connectors. I may be missing soemthing here.