I've seen nothing but problems from XFX cards. eVGA has lifetime warranties on their cards. Definetely worth $20 more!
Also, I was torn between getting raptors or just getting 7200's. I looked everywhere for reviews and honestly, the raptors don't perform that great for the amount of money you spend on them. The NCQ drives performed almost as good. Almost being...you would only see the difference in benchmarks.
As far as setting your CD/DVD to boot first, you go into "advanced BIOS settings" and it shows first boot device, second boot device, etc. Just select your optical drive to boot before your HD.