Thoroughly confused. alright so I'm going through process of connecting all the cable to their proper spots. do I connect both optical drives and hard drives to any sata 2 port on the mother board? are the sata 3 ports specific for newer drives or technology. I'll post some pics here shortly to help with the questions and to make sure everything is being placed together properly. thanks again in advance
Hard drives just need to be connected to the main power source and then any sata 2 port? just use any of the six blue sata 2 ports for hard drives and disc drives? as far as the cases audio cable, I should connect with the hd audio cable and leave the others unplugged right? what exactly are these power cables used for? and how about these ports next to the gpu sockets? is this large ribbon cable used only for optical drives that dont use that sata 2 connection? SlI ribbon? what is this for? graphics cards?
1. Yes 2. Yes 3. Yes, if you need the front green/pink audio ports on the case. If you don't use these, this connector is not required. 4. PCI express power connectors are for graphics cards. 5. PCI slots are for basic add-in devices like dialup modems, sound and network cards. PCI has since been superceded by PCI Express 1x (small slots next to the large 16x ones) but PCI is still commonly used. 6. IDE cables, the predecessor to S-ATA. If a drive uses this, it will be obvious. 7. That is an SLI bridge cable, used when a system has multiple graphics cards linked together for extra performance. With SLI (nvidia only), the bridge comes with the motherboard. With Crossfire (ATI only), the bridges come with the cards themselves, and not the board.
Sam there is 32x graphics cards? Or is that crossfire? Also what is that 8 pin in the picture for the hard drive? Back in the time when I had 2 power slots you told me to only connect one because connecting both will fry the hard drive and break it. Of the two do they both provide the same power for the same things and the same amount of power with same performance and energy(electricity) used? Which of these 2 different slots is better to use? Thanks.
I'm not sam but those 8 pins are for different jumper settings. Old IDE drives had master/slave jumper configurations, newer SATA have settings such as downgrading from SATA2 speeds to SATA1 for older controllers, different spinup options, etc. Link to WD's explanation= http://www.wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf *Edit=spellcheck*
It is impossible to have a 32x graphics card, as there is no such thing as a 32x slot. The only way to use 32x bandwidth is to use two graphics cards in a board that has a full bandwidth chipset. For the hard drive power connectors, this only applies to older drives that have both molex and S-ATA power connectors. This doesn't happen for new drives any more. With these older drives, connecting both at once could cause shorts in the power regulation circuitry due to the potential difference between the two power connections, which is why you must never use both. Neither method is 'better' than the other, but S-ATA power connectors are smaller and take up less space, so they're usually the best to use.
Alright so I finally got the last bit of money together for the rest of the parts. My next question is which windows 7 do you recommend? I"m not sure what the difference in features is. Is windows home pro fine? Also after I purchase the OS do I boot up the computer and just follow any steps that show up or is there specifics that I need to follow. Like setting up the BIOS settings, what raid setting to set it to. I hear alot about overclocking, is that just fine tuning your pc for optimal settings? If so is there software you recommend? Also is there software that I should buy that you cant see yourself living without? And last but not least, thanks again for all of your help. You guys have been awesome!
