Dual DDR & Reader Speeds

Congrats on your first home built system. Anyhow to answer some of your questions.

Most 16x DVD's are 48x Cd-roms. As for whether or not you need faster CD access, I wouldn't worry about it the small speed increase applies only to the outer rims of the disk so any performance increase is negligible. Also I wouldn't replace them until they begin to act up, I just put in a new Lite On DVD because my old Kenwood TrueX52(about 7 years old) was on it's last legs.

For the CD Recorder, I'd look at something new, in the 24-32x range. They can be had for $60 or less via online, and would be a nice upgrade. Would cut your recording approximately in half(less than 8 minutes vs the 15 or so it takes you to burn a full CD now). Also for the price, it's a nice upgrade.

As for Dual DDR. I think the jury is still out on this one. For my personally, running my A7N8X with dual ddr(2 256 DDR 400 Corsair), has netted me around 9.6% better(benchmark wise) performance than my old KR7A with Corsair DDR 2400. Now what that relates to in real world, maybe 5% so it's not a huge difference, but since two sticks of good 256 MB RAM cost about the same as 1 512, it seems to make sense to spend the same amount and get that 5% boost. Every little piece of performance boost helps, and since it adds no additional cost, why not????

As for the memory issues, Asus seems to have corrected most of them in the last few BIOS and board revisions so I wouldn't be too concerned with the memory issues complaints. Also the way the Nforce2 boards are flying off the shelves, you'll likely get a late rendition of this board.

As for me, right now I'm running a 2100+XP Tbred B at 2.07 Ghz and Sisoft tells me, I'm in tune with a P4 2.8 Rev B. (Arith 7796Mips/3143Mflops M/M Integer 11521 FPU 12269)So I'm not complaining. I've not had to adjust voltages or lower latency timings either. So going with a new Barton you should be able to do a little better if so inclined to O/C.

Anyhow good luck

Save heating costs on your home, overclock your PC!!!