I would just opt for a PCI ATA Card to connect IDE drives

Hmmm maybe so....is the pci card for an ata hard drive thing as compairable in speed as hte standard motherboard port?

Could you possibly recommend a step up from the ASROCK you said to get...and possiblly a mid tower as well?

I was thinking of the Antect Sonata III.......It comes with a 500 watt psu.

I have the Sonata II, and I love the case, though my only complaint for the new case would be no cpu tunnel fan setup.....grrrrr

Sonata 3 I saw at Cebit, not very different from Sonata 2, not sure if it's worth the "upgrade". Mobo's are not my specialty, don't want to give you incorrect advice.

I'm running 8 IDE HDDs of PCI PATA cards (2xIDE connectors on each - 4 drives on each card) and find performance to be plenty fast for my usage (file server over network), may be your usage is more demanding :)

8 drives? Impressive. As for major preformance no, none needed....its more like my c drive is for my games mostly, surfing that crap....

My other 2 drives are for files I dont want to loose or for storage.

Can you tell me which pci cards you use then?

As for mobo's I'm getting lost in all the diff types...though I must say that there is alot of crap I dont need on boards, and I hate the fact that that most of the mobo's out there have very little add on capacity as far as pci slots go....grrr...sign of the times....

Also hate hate hate on board sound or video setups....find them pure chit most times as far as quality goes, besides having to mess with settings in bios to turn that crap off to avoid conflicts.

Can you recomend a case then? Nothing fancy needed. Would be nice to have a psu with it that was decent, though I know from what I've seen so far, that be like asking my boss for a raise...lol...:P

Thanks again for all the advice...very very helpful.

if size is no problem, the Antec 900 is surely a nice one:) lots of room;

have used PCI ATA cards of different brands, no real preference

the case looks nice, now since it don't come with a psu, can you recomend one?

I've decided on going with the

HIS Hightech H195PRQT512DDN-R-V2 Radeon X1950PRO 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card - Retail

so what kinda of ps would I need, to run 3 hard reg ide hard drives, one dvd burner, a duo core 2 cpu and 2 gigs ram with that vid card up there?

Seasonic 500W should offer a good price/performance ratio;

think I found it
 

ok how is this for a mobo?

ASUS P5LD2 R2.0 LGA 775 Intel 945P ATX Intel Motherboard

it has 4 sata ports and the regular 2 ide ports I'm used to seeing....:)

stats:

# Mfr Part Number: P5LD2 R2.0(GREEN)
# CPU: Socket 775 support Intel Pentium D/ Pentium 4/ Celeron processor; Intel EM64T/ EIST/ Hyper-Threading Technology; Support Intel next generation 04B/04A & 05B/05A CPU; FSB 1066/800/533 MHz
# Chipset: Intel 945P & ICH7R
# Memory: 4x 240pin DDR2-667/533/400 DIMMs, Dual Channel, non-ECC/un-buffered, Max capacity 4GB

# Slots: 1x PCI Express x16 slot; 3x PCI Express x1 slots; 3x PCI slots
# IDE/SATA: 2x ATA-133 channel (ITE 8211F); 1x ATA-100 channel, 4x SATA2 ports support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 (Intel ICH7R)

# Audio: Realtek ALC882 8-channel High-Definition Audio CODEC
# LAN: Marvell 88E8053 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
# Ports: 8x USB 2.0 ports (4 rear, 4 by headers); 2x PS/2 ports; 1x Serial port; 1x Parallel port; 1x S/PDIF Out (Coaxial+Optical); 1x RJ45 LAN port; Audio I/O jack

# Form Factor: ATX, 12 x 9 inch / 30.5 x 23 cm
# Package: Retail
# RoHS Compliant

also what the hell uses the PCIX1 slots?

soundcard, network cards, etc. the 945P chipset is seriously dated, would not suggest getting one now if you can get P35 chipset mobo for ~same price