Had a look at the board, but could not see a PCI-X 4 slot :S. You do have a point about the CPU though, any suggestions? I want to keep the price low, also i will end up running 8 - 12 SATA drives in RAID configs. Had a look at the Pentium D 2.8.. nice price.
Ive read about the problem of if the controller dies a horrible death.
But how much of a CPU do i need to run 8 - 12 SATA drives in raid configs using software RAID, at the moment 4 * 320, and will add somewhere between 4 * 320 - 500GB HDs later.