MakeMebad1978

In general I would say that consoles are given too much negative connotation on the PC gaming world.  Like the comparison of launch title games is completely silly in my opinion.  Launch title games for consoles will never look good compared to their PC equivalents...the simple fact is almost all launch titles are developed on high end PC's using an emulator for the PS4 and XBox one.  The trouble with emulation is you can never do proper optimizations on it...and my guess would be after about 6 months you will see games that can compete against PC games (albeit they will only compete graphically for about 6 months).
 
I think the more important thing to take out of the consoles in general is it sets a new low point for PC gamers.  By this I mean developers target a wide audience in order to capitalize on the incoming money flow, and from what I have seen many people blame the consoles for holding this back.  If you look at the steam hardware though targeting for current generation consoles might also be so they could be run on the general mass of people with horrible PC gaming rigs.  Seriously look here (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) and you will see most people don't have systems that even match PS3 graphics.  With developers targeting PS4/XBox one, there will be a push to set a new low point (which after console optimizations could reach a midpoint gaming rig).  The fact is with PS4/One you will now have developers pushing multithreaded support, as well as GPU acceleration.  To me the GPU physics acceleration is a huge point, as it seems on the PC end there are too many fragmentations to create games with those optimizations (opengl vs cuda / physx).
 
So admittedly there will be a point when consoles hold back PC's, the consoles can also help push new technologies (again I feel this console war might solidify a PC standard for GPU physics acceleration).
 
*on a more personal note, I personally enjoy console gaming over PC...I don't game a lot, but when I do I just have to sit down infront of my TV turn it on and my game is already loaded very quickly...the convenience of a quick bootup is not to be overlooked...I have a media PC and a PS3, my PS3 is used for blu-rays and games more than the media PC just because of the time it takes. (And yes I enjoy blu-ray over digital downloads)

my main and only pc is stll a core 2 duo with a whole 2gb of ram.

With the cooling I have I could acctually mount two 2.5" drives on the bottom of the optical drive cage, it would be very close to the cpu cooler but since it has open sides I don't think it would restrict the airflow to much.
 
Edit: Sorry, read your post to fast, yes I could power two hdd's/ssd's and a optical drive of it, mabey even three hdd's/ssd's if I got a splitter cable.
Most 2.5" drives today are designed to be low power so I think the 150w PSU should manage this.

Zelda a link to the past on SNES

Nah sorry, I already know I just wont cut it there. I hate the sun, I hate the heat, I hate the beach. 

My god, a 650D/Air 540 in full Carbon Fiber, with the amazing look of Carbon Fiber. 
 

You should be fine going with a Noctua NH-D14 or Dark Rock Pro 2. I can run them both passively WHILE gaming and be under the TJ Max for my 3570K, only by 10-15 degrees though. If it's a HTPC you'll be using it with, you'll be fine running passively or at very low RPM.

I've used my Noctua NH-D14 as a passive cooler for a while with my 3570K at 4.1 GHz. It worked fine, temps got around 85-90C in prime. I would go with something like that instead if it will fit in your current rig. Also, if you can control your fans, it makes things very nice. i run my system entirely passive (except for my GPU's) until my MB temps reach certain thresholds. 

Personally, I wouldn't purchase it. You'd get much better results with something else.
 
Cooling performance

Here is a nice graph what bitmining actually is.

What mining does is build the infrastructure which is bitcoin is based upon.
When you are mining what you are doing is creating a ledger of every trade, every transaction, every new wallet ID, even the total amount of coins in every wallet.
Without this constantly growing ledger that keeps track everything and prevents fraud, bitcoin could not be used for anything. When someone tries to double spend or falsify trades that information is put into the blockchain and once the next block is mined, it's checked and compared against the worldwide infrastructure to see if it's a legitimate transfer. Which is why you hear about a 51% attack, that means someone controls 51% of the entire network, with that ability they are able double spend and create fake trades as their 51% stake of the network is the one that determines if it's legit or not.
 
In order to keep people mining and keep the whole network alive the miners receive a reward for solving transaction blocks.
 
While at first glance mining may seems like a pointless waste of energy, it is building the infrastructure required for a non centralized global currency to exist.
 
 
At least it's something like that ;) you should spend some time looking into the background of how and why bitcoin works.

The only reason why people mine for bitcoins is to get money from it. If you want to help others, there's folding. None of these things will make you money while you help others with beneficial number crunching.
 
You can argue that you're helping with bitcoin mining like RuecanOnRails said, but that's a different kind of help. At least that's how I see it.

Let's just say that I don't think you'll have to create a 'should I upgrade to haswell?'-thread ;)

From what I can gather; vista and onward supports AHCI out of the box, but if it isn't available in you bios then I'd have to imagine that it wasn't a supported standard back when your computer was new. If you're lucky then you might be able to find a newer bios version for your board, but I don't think you will if it's a branded computer. If it isn't then you should go to the motherboard manufacturers website and look for your specific board.