Holy jesus-mary-and-jospeh...
one, get rid of the damn 64 bit edition of windows. If you look at benchmarks it shows that the 64bit os deal only benefits real crunching applications like encoding/decoding/editing video. It can actually decrease performance on games and other standard things. Drivers are a bitch, and no one has really bought into it.. they were supposed to around 4 years ago and it never took.
I personally recommend Windows 7 the day it comes out. I've only found benefits to having it compared to Vista. Win XP is probably the best option at this point.. but things will run better on Win 7 and look better. I've had no stability issues with DFO until the new patch with the "Virtual Space" error.
two, I'd rip out the red lights.. you'll feel cool for like 3 months and then you'll be pissed off trying to sleep with the damn night-light of a computer going.
three, if you're going for raid 0, it makes NO sense to have 2x 500gb drives unless you buy a 3rd 1 terabyte external. Having 1000gb of info on a raid 0 is asking to lose your shit eventually. IMO, it's better to have 2 small drives on raid 0, running just your OS and programs while the 2 large drives spin independent with dual backups of the really important shit (pictures, records, papers, legal documents etc.)
That's minor.
I'd say you're probably paying a premium for being at the edge of the curve, but if you're ok with the money there's no way that rig won't kick ass.
Yah, firewire would be nice, but I'm not convinced yet that firewire will really stick around and it's easy enough to buy a cheap-o firewire card and install it later if you need to. E-Sata is my new favorite thing.
In short, you throw that much money at a rig, and you're going to get performance. Some things won't really give you a real benefit until perhaps much later in the life of the computer, but you're going to scream through games now.
Hope that helps a little.
Last edited by DurandalX; 04/03/09 06:33 PM.
