Another dumb PC question

[theredstar]

After advice from bods on this forum, I've decided to invest in an Asus A7n8X Deluxe board.

However I've got a couple of questions.

The board suppots Serial ATA (which is nice). Is this backward compatible with Parallel ATA? I've checked Tom's hardware, and the cables for SATA are different to PATA. Will I need to buy new harddrives/DVD drives etc?

The board supports PC3200 memory (DDR400). Is it only certain processors that operate at this speed or would I get the advantage of DDR400 even if coupled with a relatively slow processor (say XP2.4)?

Apologies for the regular questions. I feel like I'm turning into my mom

BTW Also of the recommendation of this board I got a Radeon 9700 pro (only ?170) - good call -it's blinding.

[Super Stu]

Boards which come with SATA connectors also often (if not always, from what I've seen) come with an adaptor to allow connection of a standard IDE cable.

[Ciaran]

As Stu said you can get SATA converters so you can plug your PATA to a SATA socket.

The CPU and RAM clocks can be set differently so you can have the CPU at 166FSB and the ram at 200(400DDR). But that CPU should run fine at 200 in sync. with the ram. (I've been doing it on my XP1800+ for months now).

What do you want to know about the 9700Pro?