agree with the Asus A8V board. excellent board. rock stable and easy to use. had one before i went PCI-E.for video P4 is still king but the newer AMD venice core chips may take some of that away.the A64 is still a top setup though and cheaper than intel. but if you do lots of video and graphic work go P4 if not then go A64.

a friend of mine who works at seagate, a hard drive comapny, indicated the parallel ATA cable driven drives are being phased out. get a SATA drive.here is a good article on video capture cards:www.2cpu.com/articles/113_1.htmlraid drives for home use:i wanted a raid1 situation in case i got an error. got a mother board with a built in raid controller on it. the mother board was not very expensive and it was a brand name (Shuttle), the raid controller on it was also a name brand (HighPoint). Over time i got that error, it was detected ok. I had restore problems tho, seems the HighPoint raid bios was not fully compatable with hte Shuttle bios and would not restore. If i get to do it again i will get a SATA raid controller that plugs into a pci slot. i think a raid0 situation would add un necessary complication, just get a faster hard drive.