I bought a Soyo barebones system from Fry's electronics(an american company) about a week ago for $66(US). I put memory, ide cd rom, ect... in it, and also bought a standalone Intel P4 2.4 GHz procesessor w/ fan from Fry's for $150(US). Then today I bought a cpu/motherboard combo from Fry's for $169(US) because I'm planning on returning the first one for a full cash refund and taking the cpu out of the combo set and putting it in the soyo. that would leave me with a motherboard for my next system. The combo set is prescott cpu clocked at 3.0GHz. but i read that prescott's run ridiculously hot, and the combo set did NOT come with a fan. i will buy a fan, but is that enough to keep this cool or should i water cool? also i heard that prescott's need to run @ 800MHz fsb and i think my soyo system is 533 fsb. help!

the intel retail heatsink/fan is pretty good, but you can just buy an aftermarket cpu fan/heatsink for it (look at zalman and thermalright). Those units are better than the retail ones. You don't need to water cool unless you're overclocking really high. Your soyo might be able to choose between 533 and 800...go check the specs and see. cpu's can run at lower speed, but then you've wasted all that money. If you want, you can replace the soyo board with the new mobo, and just save the soyo for a future pc.

hmm... never thought of that last idea. heh, i knew someone on here would have some good suggestions. i was talking about the front side bus speed for the prescott cpu that i bought. but maybe you are meaning that if the cpu is underclocked, then the front side bus speed will slow down with it? anyway thanks for the help, i have to get ready for work, i'll check back later. -pwd

also i just noticed about 30 minutes ago this elitegroup motherboard(the motherboard that came with the motherboard/bare cpu combo) needs a sata hard drive, so i would rather keep this motherboard for some other system, i havent' had time to see what a sata hard drive is yet. running the system at a slower speed is not that much of a waste because this is a system built only to resell. most people who want one nowadays just want to surf, and maybe p2p. so i dont need a p4 screamer, but it costs the same to build a fast one than it does a slow one.

a mobo doesn't "need' a sata drive, it's optional as all mobos have IDE connections for conventional hard drives....my prescott does not run that hot at stock speeds, it warms up when i overclock, even then it's not blistering hot

The latest Intel motherboards pretty much requires a SATA hard drive considering the LGA 775 PCI-E motherboard only come with one IDE connection. I mean, yeah you could put a DVD-RW and a hard drive on the same IDE connection, but you will lower the performance of your hard drive when the DVD-RW is being used. Besides that, if you want to install a second optical device like a DVD-Rom to copy CD's or DVD's off of you can't unless you buy a SATA DVD-Rom drive which would be stupid considering they are very hard to find and cost almost 3 times as much as an IDE DVD-Rom, But why do all of that when you can just resolve these issues by just buying a SATA Hard drive to free up both the cable ATA connections for a DVD-RW and a DVD-Rom on the IDE connection.