Here's my new rig...what do you think?

[Dragon]

no kidding? i didnt see anything. but it doesnt matter, they arent digital;, my headphones are analog, which means the speakers are going to have to be digital. cuz im lazy, but partially for DTS. anyway, once i get around to paying for them, im gonna get the new Z-5500. they look nice.

[Omega]

I would actually recommend re-thinking your storage setup. Although dual 74 gig raptors is certainly a spendy way to go, I think the money could be better spent, with approximately the same performance. I think going with anything past a 36 gig raptor doesn't make much sense at all. You don't want to drop $2/gig into storage drives. It doesn't make any difference how fast you can read a data stream, when you just need to play a video at 300 KiB/s :P (yeah, I know, it was a somewhat sarcastic exaggeration).

I recommend a standalone 36 gig raptor for your system/boot/application drive. The quick access speed is the component that's really going to matter in speeding up application loads, etc. Switching that into RAID 0 does nothing to help access speed, and just increases the consecutive read throughput, really (which doesn't come into play all that often in regular usage patterns...not on the level of needing it to go higher than ~40 MiB/s, anyhow). With 2 gigs of ram, you don't need to worry about running to your pagefile very often (unless you're planning on using this rig for a bunch of virtual machines, or something bizarre), so I'm not going to recommend a second standalone raptor for dedicated scratch usage, which could be a consideration in other systems. (Side note: don't use the raptor for anything but your system and programs; that is, don't use it for storage.)

Then, for your storage, skip RAID 1. It's needlessly wasteful. With the money you've saved on dropping from two 74 gig raptors to one 36 gig raptor, you can easily afford a nice 3ware hardware RAID controller that can handle RAID 5 well. If you're not completely familiar with the RAID levels, this allows one drive in the array to fail, and not lose any data. As compared to RAID 1, you only lose the capacity of one drive in the array, so the more drives you put into the array, the less data you lose, percentagewise. (Ex: put 4, 250 gig drives onto the 3ware 9500S-8, and you'd get 750 gigs of capacity ((4-1) * 250).)

That will be a sick system.

Though i would throw in an LC system (KOOLANCE EXOS2) It would be the smartest thing to do, most of those components run hot (especialy the Raptor, which i have been having issues with in my Falcon)