HI Hank, i am guessing you

HI Hank,
i am guessing you are a bit outdated 😀

the intel 975 chipset board will have 8 sata ports! NOT a MATX board. i would never recommend a POS like that for video.
FYI almost NO new mobos have 3 PCI slots, and what in the world would you need them for?
PCIe has taken over.

all new mobos have 4 Memory slots (except for Matx POS’s and even most of them do) and we can now buy 4Gig single sticks!

optical drive is a given i said "the basics"!

here we totally disagree. only 1 internally if you are burning mulitple disks professionally then buy a Primera or other sort of duplication tower.
FYI the more DVDs you try to burn at once the slower it burns….

drives i completely disagree as well.

NEVER read and write to the same drive.
a minimum prosummer set up is a 3 drive setup like i listed above.
where a "pro" DV/HDV(not uncompressed HD) would be
1) small OS/programs drive
2) 2 drives in raid 0 for capture/work
3) 2 drives in raid 0 for render to/storage
4) Ext storage

Video cards. a 7600 wil be dual head in fact only very low budget cards are not anymore.
a 7600 will allow for multiple overlays, 3d lower thirds etc.
for Pro use a Quadro 1500.

FYI i didnt go overboard on my recommendations for him as if you have read a few of his posts he is not doing this professionally (making money)
if he was i would be recommending a professionally built system.

thanks
scott
ADK