New build need help

Yep, everything checks out. That is a great graphics card if you don't mind the extra noise from the fan since it's overclocked. The only thing you may want to consider getting a SATA 3.0 Gb/s drive. It has a faster transfer rate than that one.

Also, make sure that you buy some cables for the hard drive. Since it is OEM, you're going to just get the drive with no manuals/disks/cables/anything. It'll just be a drive in a static-proof bag.
 
Your motherboard may come with cables, but I dunno. My ASUS buard came with an IDE and a bunch of SATA cables included, along with a bunch of 4-pin molex to SATA power converters..
 
is the difference between the harddrive im looking at and the SATA 3.0 Gb/s drive that big of a difference. will it slow down games?
 
I just upgraded from IDE to SATA a few days ago. To sum up the difference, the load times of Windows XP MCE was cut in half comparing clean installs on each drive. If you're going to be moving files around a lot (like I do), there will be a pretty big difference.

As for gaming, it really depends on the game. A game with huge amounts of detail and large areas, such as Oblivion or FEAR will show a decent performance boost. On the other hand, if you're only playing Zoo Tycoon and such, you won't notice.

From a technical standpoint, the fastest IDE drives are only up to 133 MB/s. The fastest SATA drives are up to 300 MB/s. So in theory, SATA is over 2 times as fast as IDE. (comparing ATA133 to SATA 3.0 Gb/s) I say in theory because the speed is also limited by how many RPM the drive is. If it's only a 7200RPM drive, there isn't much of a difference.

Basically, if you want to save the 50 bucks, it won't really make that much of a difference, except in the not so distant future SATA is going to overtake IDE as the standard.
 
all sata drives are compatible as long as the mobo supports sata. Even if the mobo wouldn't support sataII a sataII drive would still work, but it would of course be only as fast as a similar sataI drive.
 
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