It's SATA II (yes, it's backward compatible) and is actually cheaper
Good thing that doesnt matter (that it's SATA2)
Why not pay $4 more and get a DVD writer?
Because not all DVD burners can properly burn CDs (in fact, most cant .. or they can but with stupidly high C2 error counts)
that's a cd rw but is it a dvd+/-rw?
No
No. It's a combo drive.
A
S5
and get the 3700+ San Diego instead of the 3800+.
You dont honestly think the extra 512K will outperform a 200MHz deficit?
Also, this psu Rosewill RV450 ATX 450W Power Supply 100-120 vrms or 200-240 vrms switch-selectable CSA, CB, TUV, FCC, UL-40 might do the trick
Yes but that would be going from a 12V@34A to 12V@22A
I've never used Maxtor, but you'll hear complaints from many of their users, whereas few from Western Digital users.
Every company has complainers and whiners, Maxtor, Dell, WD, you name it theres always people who complain (and always people who jump on the complain bandwagon at the first sign of problems)
Any new dvd writer will write both in + and - formats, including cd-r(w).
Its just a matter of how well it does CDs
(i do agree that one might as well get a DVD burner but there *are* reasons still to have a dedicated CD burner drive)
You forgot the link... and I don't believe there's such a thing as cd+r.
There isnt.
Where'd that come from? Seagate is just as good as Western Digital... and has a longer 5 year warranty on their drives. You should have just sent it back.
This is what i mean by "you can always find people who have complains about <insert company name here>"
But if you don't have any personal experience with a product, what else would you base it on? I was only trying to make a point that I've run into far more Maxtor users that complain about their products as opposed to Western Digital.
Yes but its quite possible that that's because there simply more Maxtor users period.
Any reason as to why I should change?
Not really. A Venice3800 is arguably a better setup, stock, tweaked and overclocked
A lot of people like the San Diego core better thanthe Venice core which comes with the 3800 because of the doubled L2 cache (1mb vs. 512kb)
And a lot of people think AMD64s really benifit from massive amounts of L2 cache