Need help understanding various CD RE/DVD drive setups...

[Caveman]

Title says it all...

I'm thinking about purchasing a system tomorrow:

CPU and MoBo: Athlon 1.4 on a FIC AD11 w/DDR and 266 FSB
Video: Visiontek geForce 3
Sound: Sblive Gamers 5.1
Memory: 512 MB of some generic brand...
1 Floppy
1 CD @52X
1 CDRW @8x4x32

I'm going to use my CDRW as my primary backup method (burn a new CD once/week)... Is the "other" CD player a waste? I thought it would be good to have it so I can burn from one CD to the other... Also, the "readable only" CD player has a nice fast 52X speed with it. Is there a GOOD reason for having a DVD drive? What would be a good setup?

Also... My MoBo has 5 PCI slots. What plugs into these? Is this enough? I read a review that gave the FIC AD11 a "bad wrap" because of this "low" number (5). I'm wondering what a person would use all these slots for?

 

[DANNY61902]

pci slots are somewhat like internal usb ports, if you will. theyre do-it-all slots, and they house things like sound cards, really cruddy graphics cards, modems, extra usb ports, ethernet cards, firewire, and im sure theres some other stuff i left off. personally, i dunno what youre paying for that generic memory, but my advice is: dont. crucial ram is $50 last time i checked (pc2100 cas 2.5) with free shipping for a few more days. as for the cd drive, if you plan to watch dvd movies on your comp, then obviously a dvd drive is a good way to put some more wear/tear on that gf3 its always a good idea to have 2 cd drives, as having just a cdrw drive can wear it out a lot. unless you plan on buying every available product for your computer, (hey it happens.. trust me ) those 5 pci slots will do just fine.

 

[Caveman]

Thanks for the info, it was most helpful : )

 

[NelsonMuntz]

I think a DVD drive is a good investment. A Toshiba or a Pioneer (both good drives) can be had for $65-$75 shipped which isn't too much more than a good CD-ROM. The Toshiba is able to read subchannel data so it can assist in burning more disks with CloneCD. Also, you might as well upgrade that CD-RW to something faster if you are going to be using it alot. Some 12X10X32X drives can be had for less than $100 now. Look at Lite-On and Aopen. Maybe you already have that drive though... I would definitely agree that you should ditch the generic RAM and get two sticks of 256 Mb PC2100 RAM from Crucial. The prices are tough to beat with free shipping. I just ordered a 256Mb stick of cas2 PC133 last night for less than $46 to upgrade my system. The PCI slots are for everything like Danny said. I think you would be okay with five instead of six. If that board has an extra set of USB ports onboard you will be using up one of the slots in the back for that anyway. The five PCI could have sound card, Network card, Modem, Firewire adapter, and that would still leave one for something else (USB 2.0 ports).