Vic,
First I loved the posts by MatTheMurdera and expecially the sig pearl of wisdom. Grounding is a key item as he stated. Now to your question:
I assume you just got this stuff so the bios on the motherboard should be at 0801 level. Check this on the initial bootup and confirm. 0801 is not the latest but it is the currently recommended bios and is stable. From you hardware list you don't have anything strange, so no need to upgrade to a higher level that can be buggy and are more for special situations or hardware problems. I'm at 0801 level and everything works well.
If you plan to use the lan ports, you will need to get new drivers from the internet. Go to the Marvel site and get their Yukon driver. New version just published on 9/13.
Highly recommend you remove the wireless remote card on the MB. It sticks up vertically between the audio connector and the first PCI-E slot. If you aren't going to use the remote feature, this is not needed. Need to remove a screw from the backside and then pull off. Save it of course.
If you want to overclock this board some day then I recommend you remove the cooling tower on the north bridge and the south bridge. Clean up the "crappy" thermal paste and replace with Artic Silver. Also remove the logo caps on both bridges, that only serve to block heat loss from the chips. They are glued on, just be careful. There is a great article on this in detail along with great pictures that you can use to guide you at
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=106563
This was written before the P5W was shipping with a Conroe friendly bios, so the bios update/chip reflash part you can skip.
Now you are ready to proceed as follows:
Use the blue connector by the floppy drive to connect the DVD drive.
If your Seagate is IDE, connect it also to the blue connector. Be sure to set master/slave correctly on each drive with master as end drive on IDE cable.
If the HD is SATA, then connect it to the red SATA1 port (to the right of the ICH7R as viewed on page 2-4 of the MB manual). In this case you also need to make a change in Bios, main screen, IDE Configuration, set to "AHCI". This provides full sata functionality for the HD. You will also need to go to the Intel website and get the latest AHCI driver for the ICH7R south bridge chipset. Load this via F6 when installing windows. The driver install requires you to pick the proper driver from a list that scrolls off the monitor and this is not readily evident. Be sure to scroll down to get the correct driver.
Connection of USB devices should avoid use of the USB 3/4 connectors if you want to remove them on occasion. These 2 slots have special capability in connection with the remote to turn the PC on/off. Hooking up something else can be interpreted as a signal to turn your PC on/off and result in unintended functionality. You have 6 other USB slots to use so this shouldn't be a problem. I have my mouse connected to the USB 3 and so far no problems.
Read the manual. Always get the latest drivers from the internet, don't use the old outdated drivers supplied by ASUS on the CD. That's about all. This MB was one of the easiest I have ever done, really has a lot of functionality loaded onto one MB.
Couple of points:
For future upgrade of HDs, get sata drives and connect to sata1, sata3 and sata4 for fastest best performance.
Try to stay away from using JMicron connectors. They are the slowest on this MB and have numerous hardware conflicts reported. These are the IDE black connector (PRI_EIDE), the SATA_RAID1 and the external SATA connector. You will need new drivers here if you plan to use these as well.
Corsair Memory:
I had and I have seen a number of reports of memory failure problems. Corsair is very good memory so don't be alarmed. The failures are of two types:
Failure to POST, no beeps from speaker. Try to remove one stick of memory and see if it will POST. Try other stick to see if one works.
Blue screen crashes after machine is running. This is what I had when the memory got up to full temp it failed. Again, pull one stick and see if machine will work. The odds on getting 2 bad sticks is low, so you can isolate the bad one via trial.
Good Luck,
Paul
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