And here's the mainboard I went with, GigaByte's K8VNXP. And no, your eyes do not deceive you. That is a dual IDE port RAID connector...and 2 SATA RAID connectors. And from my reading, -all- of them can be hot, so you are looking at 2 SATA drives and 8 Ultra 133 EIDE ports. It also has dual ethernet controllers (one a gigabit, one a 10100), so the rendergarden will be going onto a dedicated feed and off the house router. The board supports up to 3 gig of RAM, and that blue slot behind the backpanel connectors is for a second power regulator array. The ad copy says it gives you 6 phase power smoothing, and if it or the motherboard regulator fails, then the remaining one takes over with standard 3 phase smoothing. And there is 6:1 sound, USB 2.0, AGP 8X, and a nice little idiot light feature. Next to the DIMM slots is a memory LED, and if that is lit, you have power to the slots and risk damage if you pull a stick. And GigaByte is courting the OC community with this one, as you have BIOS (and Windows level utility to same)level access of all the voltage and freq settings. I don't OC, so that is just FYI. Oh, and the XP-64 download took about 80 minutes on cable, and seems to have come through uncorrupted. You get an ISO image, so you either have to burn it to CD, or unpack it with WinImage and copy the files to a CD-R.