this is what i think..

SCSI is much more expensive.. but the performance is not much better than IDE. if the data is very important, RAID 5 is better than SCSI i think.

PCI bus can only transfer 133MB/s, so 3 IDE run RAID 5 is already close to the limit.

K8 may or may not success... for the price, i don't think i want to spend money bet on that one.

for intel system, IC7-MAX3 looks good. IC7-G is also good. a little bit cheaper.

if you have a 2.4G now, next your you can upgread to prescott. i think IC7-MAX3 is prescott ready.