by ProHandyman on Thu May 31, 2007 12:00 pm
I can help you with your RAID choices. Depends on what you are looking for: speed, security, speed and security (though nothing replaces a good back-up).
I run RAID 0 on my machine. My hard drives have good warranties, case is properly cooled, and I take regular (well, I try!) backups, including images for bare iron recovery. SPEED in loading and saving is the game here.
RAID 1 gives you the SECURITY of having an hard drive crash, but won't save your butt if your nailed by a virus or you do something stupid! It is also SLOWER then just having a single drive.
I've only had a HDD crash once, and had a "bare iron image" that was just 2 weeks old available, so no great loss. I also keep all my documents, etc on a seperate drive which has regular back-ups taken also. Any really important documents you could be burning to DVD-RW, etc.
Unless your an AVID gamer playing at resolutions beyond 1600x1200 with all the eye candy on, the need for 2 8800gts in SLI is a waste of your precious money! The other would be using a 30" or bigger wide screen display that requires dual DVI hookups, but even then the cards would be running seperately, not in SLI (I may be wrong about the SLI thing)
Remember that adding a few more fans, hard drives, and a power hungry video card is going to neccesitate a power supply upgrade too! 650-800 watts would not be out of the realm!
As far as a case.... what is your budget? There are some great full size cases that lend themselves to constant hardware upgrades, and cool very well! I love my CM Stacker, and of course Lian-li, SilverStone, Apevia, and a number of other well built cases. Looks can be deceiving... just because it looks cool, and has a zillion fans doesn't mean it will cool properly! You also want 120mm fans over all other sizes. I've started to switch to aluminium or aluminium combination cases for my main, constantly changing rig. My existing Antec now weighs almost as much as I do, and that is NOT a good thing!