Sorry for starting a new thread about this but i didn't find an asnwer in the other thread.

Im thinking about buying a new motherboard. Now im confused about the differences between A7N8X, A7N8X-VM and A7N8X Deluxe. Which one is best/fastest? I'm also confused about this SATA -thing. I understand that the DELUXE modell supports SATA, but can i still use a "standard" HD drive with the Deluxe or does teh drive have to support SATA? How much better is SATA? Should i consider buying the Deluxe -modell instead and upgrade my HD to SATA?

Thanks in advance!

Well, I can answer the Deluxe SATA question. You need SATA drives or a PATA-to-SATA converter on each drive to use the SATA controller. You still have two IDE (PATA) connectors on the board to use for older drives and CD/DVD, just like most motherboards. You can disable the SATA controller by means of a motherboard jumper.

SATA in non RAID is faster in burst mode and the SATA drives are a bit faster. The newer large capacity SATA drives are faster than the original version. For real speed the 36GB WD Raptor drives are still the king; they'll be even better when the 72GB version comes out. Set up as RAID you can get ~110 MB/s read/write.

the -vm model has integrated gefoce4 mx440 graphics