well heres the thing, its not a full rebuild..
In fact the only thing i did was install a Quad core, new ram and the mobo itself.

I would always recomend a fresh install with a fresh build of any new HW, but for me and my current workload, i dont have teh time to mess around with that, so i dedicated 1 week to this, and i barely scraped through
If i was only using Vegas on the machine and nothign else, i woudl have def gone fresh install with new HW.
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As my machine serves as a secondary office email unit, PS CS3 workstation, network server, printer server, remote server, website workstation ( i work on my website on here) etc etc reinstalling everything just woudlnt work for me..

So i found a hybrid board which could handle PCI and AGP, but still offered socket 775 support I only found one.. and i had been looking for over a year for somethign like this..
in any case, i bought the Asrock 4coredual SATA 2, which had the features i wanted, albeit a lil stunted in the speed department.
The CPU is a Q6600 with go stepping (newest build) wihch is designed for overclocking.. Im not overclocking at ths time but i belive i can theoretically hit around 300 on the FSB which woudl bring the cpu up to 2.7gh

However judging from the rendertest results, its not much slower than the highest of the high end machines on that thread. In fact its faster than most and rendering to PAL even faster. So i dont see the need to mess with somethign if it works.
THe ram i use is Corsair. Ive never had an issue with it and in fact, i still ahve my old original DDR1 sticks on my old mobo from about 5 or so years ago whch are still as good as new. Cant say the same for Geil or anyother generic brand. Geil was fast but did have latency issues on my 3nd box.
Now that ive got this machine working, I'll be moving my old hardare out of this box, into the OTHER box which is also in dire need of an update.

At least with what ive just done, ive pretty much upgraded 2 machines for the price of one.
This one with the new quad build and the old parts from this machine to go into the actual office machine. then the office mchien can be sold on ebay for a hundred bux or something.. lol

One ting i have noticed is that rendering MPG2 is dead fast.. so fast that its actualy rather scary and i keep thinking that the HDD's cant sustain those speeds.
The idea however was to have a system with no bottlenecks, and i think even with single IDE drive, you shoudlnt come across any bottlenecks consideirng these can push out quite a substantial amount of data on a single non raided stream.

I would say go Raid with a mirror if u have the money for it, and i would df say go 4gb ram. Im only using 2, but this board diesnt support any more, which im ok with coz i really dont need any more.. ive used 1gb ram now for over 5 years so mi nto missing out on much.
Sata and mobile hotpluggable esata ports are also somethign to consider if our on teh go, or if u have a lappy and a desktop and u want to sapw projects around.
As it stands i do this with USB,

Power supply.. make sure its at least 500w and a GOOD well named brand. I use Antec and havent had an issue in 6 yeras. However after the 4th year on on of my machines, one of teh PSUs dud give out. it was easy to pick up the isuse as it woudl kill itself whenever it got hot. within 24hrs i as working again. so at least there was sufficient warning
..
The case i use is an Antec 1080 truepower unit.
It has 4 Drive racks, and 2 caddys which can hold 3 HD's each 10 drives all up
I dotn liek the non proprietary internal USB connection for teh mobo chassis though. each wire is orphaned so ou have to line up each pin accordin go the USB port... this is bloody confusing so i dont bother with it.
I did have Laser (cheap bargain basement) ide Swap chassis which lasted abotu 6 months with my use, but after that, of the 5 units i had, 1 remains operational. Although IDE would have been faster, these racks jsut dont cut it for what we do
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On this system i have 7 HDD's 1xMain system drive and a DVD burner.
I do not have a raid setup anymore (ive lost alot of data with raids... and its unrecoverable, so id rather work with individual units and if any of these go, well at least i dont lose my livelihood..

air throughput is great with 1 fan on one caddy, another fan under the second, a side vent, and 2 exhausts. Th ePSU also has its own vents as well, but the case acts a great heatsink and im yet to have issues with heating (even down here in south west sydney)

hope this helps somewhat.

I shoudl point out that i had ben lookin at a build liek this since core2 dual cpus were released.
i was anxious about upgrading because of this configuraiton and how i didnt wnat to lose the settings on this machine.

I did alot of research and in that time, not only did ram change, but so did Mobo options, sata capabilties and obvioulsy prices.

BY the time u begin looking, once u finish, go back and start again as more than likely a new mobo would be released as for me, it was teh mobo that was the biggest issue

Thanks!

i guess in a nutshell, as you are not scimpng on the budget u can go pretty far... the new Q6600 overclock quite well.. ive seen instances of the unit running stable at 3.2gh using only fans

FWIW - I run my Q6600 @ 3.15Ghz (it goes much faster) with FSB of 1400Mhz running 8GB DDR2 800 - only a simple cpu tower cooler and fan (fan runs very slowly and quietly - even on heavy rendering). The quads are fantastic!
Also, very useful for multitasking.

I don't use raid either - gets difficult for data restoration if something goes squiggly, and not finding it to be a bottleneck anyway without it.

hey Kenny, what Mobo you running? canu do me a favour and run the render test? Id love to see your results in NTSC and PAL

The Penryns are looking might tempting. On some encoding benchmarks they're 2x the quads. Might need deep pockets though.

Bob.