Glenn,

I haven't had any blue screen problems from the Audigy drivers. I also don't load any of the extra Sound Blaster software, only the driver.

I have a couple of the 80GB Western Digitals, and I agree they are whiny. However, a couple new Western Digitals I have (a 120GB SATA and a 160GB Ultra ATA) are much quieter.

As far as SATA goes.. I have never been able to render/export/edit on the same drive when I was using 7200RPM IDE drives.. Now with SATA I do everything on the same drive..

The current SATA standard provides significant benefits over ATA in terms of convenience, power consumption and, most importantly, performance.

There is about a 5% performance gain over EIDE, unless you use like 10K Raptors in RAID 0..:) Anyways, wait for SATA II 300MB/Sec that will be awesome.. Hopefully in time for HDV to become standard.

http://www20.tomshardware.com/storag...hd-250-01.html
Tom's Hardware Review

Are any DVinfo'ers using silent cooling systems? What do you use, what did it cost, where did you get it, and what sorts of processors will it work with?

The blue screen of death problem was with the old SB Live sound cards (and with Windows set to not reboot on a BSOD). The newer sound cards should be fine.

Personally I don't like a manufacturer who can release a buggy product like the SB Live.

Darn those SB Live's..LOL! Yeah they were terrible when it came to anything but gaming and normal use..

I can say I've never had any problems with the Audigy 2 cards.. I'm thinking about the Audigy 4 now..:)

P.S. I use the Audigy's because of the Matrox requirements..

Just a few points about our DIY machines

1) Our machine has to be a jack of all NLEs. And as a guideline. There is some degree of overkill. As was mentioned, Vegas does not take advantage of GPU. So adding an expensive graphics card for vegas is not necessary.

2) When we built our first machine, we were expecting to see faster disk speeds than EIDE. We did. We feel that for video editing SATA is better and faster. We also like the improved airflow you get from the SATA cables. We loved how easy it was to set up the SATA raid 0 with our DIY2 machine. We stand behind our recommendation of 7200RPM SATA drives for video work.

3) Overclocking - we did this because so many of our custoemrs asked about it. Overclocking is risky. We do not overclock our machines beyond 10%.

I have settled in on 5% for my home machine. I use AiBooster NOS feature which only overclocks as needed. The nice thing about the ASUS AI Booster is that you can easily control your overclocking and settle in on the best settings for you.

I did run my machine at 10% for some tests. Over the next few days I had a couple of crashes and at other times the machine appeared to be acting funny. The heat readings were still within acceptable levels. At 5% we did not run into any stability issues.

Once again, the purpose of our DIY articles is as a guideline and reference. Things change quickly in the computer world and there is always going to be a faster/ cheaper alternative.

Gary
Videoguys.com

Gary, thanks for the follow up and the articles, I do appreciate and understand that the information is somewhat subjective and has a limited shelf life, helpful nonetheless!