A couple updates and thoughts:
1. Newegg rocks. They got the HD to me from NJ in 52 hours from time of order for UPS Ground. I had everything by Friday at 10 am with a Thursday morning order.
2. I am still amazed by the quality of these parts. They go together so well. The little things that ASUS did that help you conect front panel sound, power, USB, Firewire etc. are so well thought out. I hated messing with those wires trying to get them plugged in to the Mobo the last time I did this. This time there is a liitle dohicky you plug em in to and then that plugs into the board. Wonderful.
3. What to say about the case. Unreal. So solid, pretty and overall great to work with. They thought of everything.
4. Cool 'n' Quiet. Enabled that today after 3+ days of running this thing. I thought it was quiet already and noticed that I had to enable it specificly in the BIOS. The loudest thing is the Optical drives and the HD and those are pretty quiet. HUGE difference from what I was running before. Oh yeah - and I have no AC and live in San Diego. My office is in the Southest corner of the house (hottest) and I have to tell you that things are running really cool. I don't know much about this stuff, but the processor normally runs at 29C. Nice.
Closeup of the Zalman Cooler before I attached the duct thing. Cool air is forced in to the CPU cooler and then pushed out by the CPU fan. I suspect with this setup, I could try this without the CPU fan, but I can't hear it anyway so I won't bother. . . yet. I bet this thing is great for one of those passivly cooled solutions though.
Card shot
Other side
So here it is before I installed the 2nd Optical and the 2nd SATA drive. The cables are a mess. I will show pictures next time of them cleaned up.
Here is a thing that I found on the LIAN LI site that describes how the airflow works. It worked on my PC when I embedded it so I hope it shows up for all of you. The fans are totally quiet and run normally around 1200 RPM. I bet that will even go down as it cools off after summertime. This case is a perfect thing to compliment that AMD Quiet stuff I mentioned above.
<embed src="http://www.lian-li.com/Product/Chassis/Swf/fan_pc101_w01.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="250" height="250"></embed>
After all is said and done, I should have gotten the 590chipset afterall though. I like the idea of the dual PCI-E 16 slots. The 570 lets you put two PCIE16 cards in but gates the second slot to PCIE-8. I would have liked to use the upper slot to get the heatsink centered on the exhaust even though I did not use two cards. It was only another $50 but live and learn.
If anyone can tell me if this matters or not (cough Lazereth) I would appreciate it. I am pretty sure that no card on the market today taxes PCI to the point where the throughput even matters, but maybe someone here knows if that is right.
Finally - thanks for reading and checking out the thread everyone. It is fun for me. I will have one more post at least on it and still owe a monitor review to
Guthmund (it rocks and there is an in -depth review on Tom's Hardware if you need it faster).