This is ridiculous because I had to purchase (10 of them) my own IDE cables. I’m building three systems to order and the motherboards came with one IDE cable and a lot more SATA cables than needed! Why didn’t they include a second IDE cable for the CD-ROM? Why??! I think times has changed and everything is converting over to SATA hardware: real fast and easy installation. I’d admit, there are a lot more IDE hardware out there then SATA. It’s going to take another 5yrs+ before they rid of IDE cables all together I’d suspect. Anywho, I’m building an AMD Athlon X2 system (single-core). Dual-core isn’t called for in this application and for what it’s running, it’s way beyond need of dual-core technology. I’m still using single-core. Albeit, sometimes I needed the exta “umh” but 95% of the time, I don’t. So not worth investing in!

Besides the build, Intel is tearing AMD to shreds with their introduction of the Core 2 Duo processor with the addition of large L2 cache in the summer of 2006. Intel’s chip is running at 65 W but without the integrated DDR2 memory control which is an integral part of every AMD Athlon’s processors ability to crunch data. Running at 85 W, the AMD chip runs hotter than Intel’s Core 2 Duo. Even with the AMD 3.0GHz Athlon 64 X2, still can’t beat the Intel’s chip on benchmarks. Both companies are lowering their processor prices to LOW LOW prices to compete with each other though but I’m still stuck on AMD because of it’s unrivaled reliability.