I've been looking at this case just in the last few days. I really like my antec 1200, but having the hard drives face the mobo makes hiding cables for a lot of drives nearly impossible.

I like...

Yep, PCIe is all backwards compatible. Also, you will hardly lose any performance using the card in a 2.0 slot (in terms of gaming, compute stuff does take a bit of a hit).

You should be able to pull out one of the pins from the AC97 connector and cut the wire as far back as possible, then use it to replace the pin with the cut wire on the HD audio connector, giving you...

sweet system, count me in!

Yes, that will work just fine. I have been doing the same thing connecting the 7.1 ch outputs from my soundcard to the multichannel inputs on my receiver for years now. Works great and sounds...

The WD10EARS is also the one that is using WD's new Advance Drive Format with 4k sectors. Here's the anandtech article http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

just a second here, guys. The speaker outputs in cars are NOT 12v dc. They are an ac signal of varying voltage just like every other speaker output. Line level is also ac, just of a lower voltage...