I received my electronic engineering degree in 1974 and have designed computers, at the chip level, for Pixar, SGI and those used in television and eye surgery. That gives me 30 years experience.

Running five fans for a ten degree improvement in temperature is a wasted effort.

I'll say it again, if your fans are slowing down due to a power reduction, you will crash and have errors. YOUR fans are slowing down because they are controlled by the motherboard bios.

Wrong. They're not controlled by the motherboard BIOS. They're simple fans, connected directly to the power supply, not the MB. There's only one reason they're slowing down - less power. It's the same reason the sound volume lowers. The problem was worse when I had a 350W supply. It got much better with the 400W. As soon as I go with higher, the problem will be gone.

My 3.2 is oc'd to 3.54 right now. And keep in mind everything else I have in there. Want to know my temps?

CPU - 86 F
MB - 91 F

And that's AIR cooling, not water.

Again, don't tell me I don't know my own PC.

Ari, you might want to consider the 3.2C (canterwood) instead.

why Canterwood:

slightly cheaper.

less heat --> potential for lower noise. Also more comfortable if your room has heat problems.

Your PSU might last longer (no idea if getting a Canterwood will significantly improve things). At most, this is worth several dollars since PSUs don't fail often.

Uses less electricity. This can add up to considerable savings (maybe $30?). This takes some time to calculate though. If you render a lot with your computer, leave it on all the time, and are going to pay for its electricity for 4 years then you will get good savings going with the Canterwood.

Performance-wise, most tech sites like anandtech.com show that Canterwoods are ~6% faster than Prescotts of the same clock speed. However, most of them do not look at video benchmarks. One benchmark I have seen for encoding of some sort (I forget) puts the Prescott ahead by roughly 6%.

You do not have to check for motherboard compatibility.

why Prescott:
The Prescotts have the SSE3 instruction set, which offers the potential for better performance *if* programs are written to take advantage of them.

Get normal RAM, enhanced latency RAM is definitely not worth it for video.

The best buy is to get 2 or 4 DIMMs of the same model RAM. Install the pair(s) in the right slots in your motherboard- usually they are color coded for each pair. Buying RAM this way ensures they will run in dual channel mode. The performance gains are really, really good compared to the small price you pay for going dual channel.

You can improve performance with normal RAM by tweaking the RAM timings/latency lower. Use memtest86 to test for stability. Also enable PAT if your board supports it. For example, the Abit IS7 does. The PAT feature is never called PAT though and will never be found on Intel boards- do your research. For rendering in Vegas, PAT and RAM timings make no measurable difference (<1%) although they might for encoding tasks.

It also may not be worth your time to tweak things since the performance gains are small. Overclocking is one tweak that does give you substantial gains, but it takes time to test for 100% stability.

2- Ari, your prices for some items look a little high if you live in the US. Check newegg.com for US prices.

3- If you want to install your OS on a SATA drive, then you should probably get a floppy since you need SATA drivers to install Windows XP.

Personally I would get PATA drives since they are cheaper and offer the same performance. As far as airflow goes, you can do origami on the cables ('cablegami') and put them at nice angles and out of the way.

I should add that the sonata cases come with the Antec true power 380 watt power supply. they rate their ps on the conservative side...

I think if you're looking at the antec ps, you'll be fine..