Since you are concerned about noise and heat…as you should, I can tell you from experience that the the Velociraptors emit a high pitched whine! If you don’t properly isolate the drive from the chassis… everytime the drive spins-up (if your hearing is like mine) you will notice it! I’m now using a Caviar Black series 2TB Western Digital drive and I don’t notice it in the case (Silverstone Fortress FT02B), but this case is far from silent! I also have a SeaSonic 1050w X series power supply and that also has a fan that will start under load, hence I also notice that! Check my sig… you will see that i’m curently using the P9X79 Deluxe model with the Intel 3930k Core i7… this machine screams and it is not overclocked!
I like the Asus X79 offerings, but be careful in your model selection if you are using older audio or firewire cards! The Deluxe model doesn’t even have a legacy PCI slot, or native Firewire, but does have 2 PCIe 1x slots that are shared with other on-board functionality! If you are thinking Asus… go to the website and grab the manual pertaining to your motherboard selection and “READ THE FINE PRINT” concerning the shared functionality of the PCIe slots!
That being said… I love my new machine! 
Al