Hi Everyone, I'm building a PC for the first time. I plan on using this as my main general purpose powerhorse that will complement my 2 year old laptop. Reliable storage is important to me. Maybe some gaming, but I'm not too obsessed with graphical performance. I plan on dual booting Windows and Ubuntu.

The Parts:
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83 GHz ($220)
Item= N82E16819115041

ASUS P5Q3 Intel P45 ($145)
Item= N82E16813131344

LIAN LI PC-61 ATX Mid Tower with Seasonic 550W Powersupply ($160)
Item= N82E16811112200

CORSAIR 6GB DDR3 1600 ($125)
Item= N82E16820145236

Western Digital WD1001FALS 1TB SATA ($100)
Item= N82E16822136284

EVGA GeForce 9400 512MB ($55)
Item= N82E16814130389

Samsung DVD/CD RW w/ LightScribe ($28)
Item= N82E16827151173

Any comments/suggestions/advice/flames?

I am interested in setting up RAID (either RAID 1 with 2 HDs or RAID 5 with 3 HDs). The motherboard supports these RAID levels, but would it be hard to get both Windows and Ubuntu to boot off this "fake RAID" (is that what they call it)?

Thanks for the advice, Scott. Since only two of slots work at full performance, I think I may get the following RAM set instead:

OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1600
Item# N82E16820227324

This motherboard looked good to me at first, but as I read more about it, it seems a bit sketchy. The reviews are mixed (but reviews seem to be a bit mixed for most motherboards), with some users complaining about its RAM performance. Maybe I'll look into some other options as well.

Could someone suggest some reliable motherboard manufacturers? I know some of the major names like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, but I don't really know that much about their reputations for quality and reliability.

I am also going to forgo setting up RAID as well. It seems like it would be just easier to just do backups to a second hard drive manually or with a utility. A friend of mine also pointed out that if the motherboard dies then it might be fairly difficult to recover the RAID array.

ProstheticHead, if I'm reading this right, the XFX Revo 64 RAID controller card attaches to a PCI bus at 66 MHz. That's not a lot of bandwidth for hosting multiple, modern SATA II hard drives. Such an array could saturate the available bandwidth of a 66 MHz PCI bus. Also, as I understand it, JBOD doesn't provide a performance increase.

However, the idea of a dedicated hardware RAID controller card is sound, especially since there are multi-lane PCI-E cards available today with far more available bandwidth. Such a setup would be expensive, but it's "real" RAID, not fake RAID!

http://tweakers.net/reviews/43.....ina-6.html
http://www.dell.com/content/to.....s&l=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....bandwidths

yebellz, that's a very good question you ask. For any task in which the CPU is the primary dependency, the clock speed always matters. Assuming the same CPU core, and that's very important, the higher clock speed will mean that CPU-bound tasks are finished faster. With I/O bound tasks, such as waiting for the hard drive to return data or waiting for the user to press a key, the clock speed is unimportant. It becomes a choice of whether the CPU can do nothing 2.83 billion times a second or do nothing 3.16 billion times a second!

In practical use, the number of cores is less important because not every operation can be broken down into parts that can be operated on independently. Not every application is multi-threaded, nor does every multi-tasking operation take advantage of all the cores. When multiple cores can be put to use, they will definitely be able to complete tasks faster than a single core at the same speed. However, the processing power does not scale linearly with the number of cores. In other words, 2 cores can't complete a task in half the time as one.

The bottom line is that a faster clock speed will be helpful more often than multiple cores will be. For certain applications that are designed for multiple cores, the quad core can outpace a dual core with a higher clock speed.