Motherboards these days

[Jaybird]

My ASUS K8N-E Deluxe got fried in a thunderstorm. It's been a while since I have had to purchase a motherboard and one question I have is do I have to worry if my hard drive is IDE? When shopping, many of the specs I see are vague about the storage - ex:- 2 x Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33 - 2 x Serial ATA ??? Is it possible these days to get a motherboard that doesn't have an IDE connection for my HD?
Also, if some one could please advise on a comparable or better replacement for this one. This one had one AGP slot. Would a PCIe be better? I'd like to game a little.

(edit) To clarify: I'm looking for a motherboard that is not SATA. I want to use my existing HD which is IDE. My question is how careful do I have to be not to get SATA? Do they come with IDE cables too?

 

[Ghostman 1]

Whats wrong with IDE ? You can get either IDE or sata for your hard drive now days, most motherboards these days are SATA.. BUT when installing the OS you might need a special driver disk
for the sata connection..

 

[edijs]

PCIe>AGP. You'll need a new VGA, obviously - but it's twice as good.

IDE is not quite dead, yet. Most of the CD/DVD drives work on IDE connections; but SATA drives are so cheap (got a 500GB for ~64$) that it won't be too much pain to throw away that old drive.

 

[Jaybird]

Yeah. I'm just trying to save some bucks where I can. Thinking I may get another socket 754 motherboard in order to keep the CPU. But I'd like to upgrade so would like a faster bus and ability to upgrade the CPU when possible.