Johnnydnh: I don't think it is the motherboard. I have an Epox 8KHA+ with that same KT266A chipset. In most benchmarks these mobo's perform exactly the same. Did you also have harddisk activity? I know my harddisk is still one of the fastest available. I've seen some Maxtors that are just a tad faster when only one program is accessing them. A D740 model if I remember correctly. Is that the one you have? FAT32 is usually also a little faster then NTFS. Marc