[DBonniwell]

My last upgrade had a glitch I could not remove so I have decided to do a further upgrade to my system.
First item
What I am going to purchase is:
An Intel BLKD975XBX2KR Mother board
E6600 Intel Conroe 2.4GIG processor
Corsair 2x1gig memory
Saphire X1950 Pro video card PCI-E 16X
Artic cooler CPU fan

What I keep:
Plextor PX760A dvd drive (master)
52x Liteon cd drive (slave)
Seagate 250 gig Berracuda (slave) New HDD
Caviar 40gig (Master) Old HDD
Emermax 500W
Floppy drive 3.5 slot
12 in 1 Card reader that inserts into my empty 3.5 slot
Sound blaster Extreme gamer sound card (New) PCI
PCI card for more firewire and 2.0 USB connections
External DVD drive and external Seagate HDD drive
Brother printer
XP dual boot, Japanese and English

Questions
1.
the mother board i am getting has four slots for memory, I am buying only 2 sticks of memory, Two are blue slots and two are black. Slots 0,1 or 0,2 or 0,3?

2.
The mobo I am buying has only one IDE/PATA connector and also comes with two SATA cables. I never used SATA before. Since I have a master and slave HDD, I assume from reading I connect with SATA, but which connector? Can I assume the DVD and CD drives are reconnected to the IDE/PATA connector. Please advise wiring here.

3
In term of software, what peparation should I be thinking about? Putting the XP installation CD in the drive before before shutdown or boot disks? would like to know more about what I should be thinking here.

4
Anything else I should be thinking of?

I am not sure if asking these questions on one thread violates a PChelpforum rule, if it does I will reconstruct this message. Thanks

[upgrader]

1. You should put your memory next to each other in the closest bank to the processor.

2. You need SATA Hard Drives to use Sata devices.

3. To Install XP you will need to set the primary boot device to CD/DVD-ROM in the BIOS, Save changes and then insert the xp disc and restart.

4. Your motherboard manual will help you a lot in connecting things etc.

Of course it is not violating a PCHF rule, that would just be awkward.

Enjoy,

Chris

[DBonniwell]

It seems I have run into another wall.
My HDD are IDE /PATA
I did a search for adaptors, HDD IDE to SATA Mother board. They exist with a max 150MB/S transfer rate.
Will this adaptor do anything to performance of the computer esspecially when playing games?

[AW_3_3]

it shouldnt, because IDE only goes up to 133MBps. SATA is much faster, so it should affect performance, but i am not an expert on SATA. also i find it hard to beleive the motherboard doesnt have any IDE connectors on it.

[DBonniwell]

to restate my question
Do these hdd IDE to SATA adaptors or convertors work well?
thanks

[upgrader]

ive never used them myself but i think they do, wait for another response if you want.

[ih8bills]

They do the job.... If you want to take full advantage of this mobo, though-- you should get new hd's too.
Modern boards are SATA II-- which has double the older sata-drives --and a little more than double IDE drive's data transfer rate.
Plus you get the added benefit of easier installation and better airflow inside the case.

Depends on the budget I guess.