Unfortunately, NewEgg's email response was to deny compensation. I've appealed it. We'll see.Connectors - Two Kinds, Front Panel Connectors (USB, Firewire, Audio) and Case Connectors (Switches and Lights). I described the latter. On the former, pay very close attention to audio. Read the Mobo manual closely on that.MicroGuru - the built in utility does much the same. BTW, I've made heavy use of the back plane clear CMOS switch - worth its weight in, well, whatever you really like.Tip Of The Day - For some unexplained reason, SATA disks are recognized by the BIOS in non-numerical order of their connectors as to ports 2 and 3. It shows in the manual. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong, when nothing was wrong.XP's fully installed and fully updated and activated as Genuine bought and paid for stuff; all relevant drivers are installed. I'm going through the process of formatting the additional 2 SATA drives now, about 45 minutes each for a full format. Then I'll add the audio card and drivers, a few management utility programs, and I'll be ready to install FSX. I want some baseline stats before doing any overclocking.-Seadog

Seadog..... I can't believe Newegg would deny you compensation -- that's just ridiculous when they've compensated so many other people for their rebate screw-up! I don't know if it would help, but my CSR was "Maria" and she got my refund approved in a single phone call. Of course, that may be irrelevant if Newegg has made a "corporate decision" to shift the blame to its customers. Arrrgh! On a brighter note, ZipZoomFly has given me a store credit to match the current sale price of my XFX 8600GT ($109.99 after MIR). Still not quite as good as the deal you got, but I can't complain. It's due to arrive tomorrow and I can't wait to get my hands on the darn thing! I really appreciate the various tips you're passing along. I don't think I would have ever figured out the reversal of SATA ports 2 and 3 on my own. Question: except for the designated "boot drive," does it matter whether I populate the various SATA ports in non-numerical order? (in a non-RAID configuration). If I'm not mistaken, the higher-numbered ports are a little closer to where my DVD drives will be physically located. Glad to hear you've successfully gotten your OS installed! When I added my (older) SATA drive to my current HP rig, I could hardly believe how easy it was to install and format it. (Of course, in that instance the OS had already been preinstalled by HP.) Hope yours is going as smoothly. I'm still at least 10 days away from getting to that point. Just out of curiosity, why'd you decide to buy a separate audio card, rather than using the IP35 Pro's on board audio? I know there's a slight performance hit with on board audio, but I thought with today's CPUs the hit was inconsequential. Thanks again, and I hope your install is still going smoothly. - Lee

Lee, rather than find out what problems it might cause and then have to fix them, I used the SATA ports in numerical order. Since I installed XP on the Port 1 drive from a DVD which was on Port 4, I then had drives C and D. As I prepared to format the next two SATA drives on Ports 2 and 3, I saw the drive letter of the first was going to be E. So I bailed out, shut down, unplugged the data cable for the DVD and let XP format the 2 SATA drives, which then came in as drives D and E. Shut down, replugged in the DVD and it was recognized as F. Just the way I wanted it. I have no knowledge one way or the other about using the board SATA ports out of numerical sequence or with gaps in that sequence, but I don't think it much matters. Those 6 SATA ports are all right next to each other on the right edge of the board, so I don't think distance to the DVD from one or another of them will be a factor, in any case.Two reasons for an addon Creative XFi Gamer audio card: First, I'm not convinced the CPU cycle absorption hit would be inconsequential, but whatever it is, I want all the CPU cycles I can get for FSX; Second, if you want to use headphones and a mike for voice com and also have the ambient and machine sounds go only to speakers, you have to use both the onboard audio and a second audio source, one of the new features of FSX compared to all that went before it. And I want that 5.1 sound around me in addition to the phones and mike capability. Especially, I want that subwoofer woofing.:-cool And the third of those two reasons is that the onboard Realtek audio codec is not the most elegant of solutions for reproducing audio, in that the drivers fail to implement correctly some audio effects known as EAX. Spending what I'm spending, wanting it to last quite a while, I just wasn't interested in putting up with defects. I've put up with second best compromises for many years. For a few dollars more, I put that behind me. Finally, the fourth of those two reasons is that the particular audio card I selected has Intel HiDef Audio-out front panel pin connectors, a rarity on audio cards. Don't know how or why I'd use them, but, by cracky, I've got them now.Everything's fine so far, the audio and video are working great. Friday and Saturday are days off for real life, then back to installing software.-Seadog