New setup, any tips?

[Mitsu3kGTVR4]

So I have all my parts and I'm ready to put everything together, but before I do, I was wondering if I should be aware of anything before doing it. I'm not too experienced with this configuration so any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is what I have:

Case - Antec Sonata 2 which came with a 450 watt psu, may not be enough...
Motherboard - Intel 975XBX2KR
Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo 6600
Memory - 2 GB Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400C4, 4-4-4-12, 2.1
Hard Drives - 2 80 gig sata Seagate 7200's which I'd like to setup with Raid 0 and just run Vista on that, then 2 other sata hard drives to put all my data on.
Video Card - a crappy dual dvi pcie for now until I figure out what I want later

Any known issues I should know about before setting this up? The one thing I definitely need help with is configuring the memory correctly. Not really sure what the best settings are. I don't have any experience with Raid, but it seems easy enough. So let me know what you guys think, thanks

 

[Dr DMoney]

Go to your bios to set your ram, 4-4-4-12, 2.1v. Corsair ram never boots up right automatically, so just set it up manually. As for Raid, just look at some guides on the net. I will give you a link soon.

 

[Sora]

Yea Corsair XMS is now the brand of memory I actually frown apon becuase of all the things I keep hearing about it. I've had people's XMS that didin't overclock more DDR2-900, or it won't boot up on the right volts. It's really dissapointing, and that's why I went with G.Skill.

I haven't had any problems yet. Yea though manually set the timings and volts in the BIOS.

 

[Mitsu3kGTVR4]

thanks for the replies, i'll try setting the memory timings manually. what slots should i put each 1gb stick into?

both in black or both in blue? does it matter?

anything i should know about seating the processor?

 

[Fat.Clown]

place each sticks in the same color for dual channel

 

[Mitsu3kGTVR4]

does it matter which color?

 

[King X13]

Just because ive come across this 2 times already im going to mention it to be more specific. there are motherboards out there that put there the same colors next to each other, example(green,green, orange, orange) instead of (green, orange, green, orange). dual channel goes by the dimm numbers, so a stick in dimm 1 & dimm 3 will provide dual channel or memory in dimm 2 & dimm 4, of course if its in all 4 that will also be dual channel.

no the colors dont matter its the dimm numbers like i mentions above.

 

[Dr DMoney]

Just put them in the same color for dual channel. Since it is blue black blue black. And does not matter which.

 

[Mitsu3kGTVR4]

all set up, system runs great with vista 64. raid was easy to create, but in device manager it doesn't recognize the driver for "serial ata controller"

i tried looking on intel's site and i installed the chipset drivers and the intel matrix storage drivers but it still has a ! next to it. any ideas?

 

[bonoz]

How much did the setup cost you? jus wondering.