This is great, an answer to a question I didn't even get to ask yet.
I'm in ~ the same price range and at first I was considering buying a pc from
Vicious that has an E6400 processor and a 7950GT for over $1500, after finding this forum and looking at this thread I'm thinking I might as well bite the bullet and do a build for the first time and get more bang for my buck. [ECHO] everybody's doin' it doin' it doin' it, it'll make you feel good good good [/ECHO]
I'm wondering about a few ideas I got off of their build choices that I don't see here (and I realize there was a $1400 cap).
They were using a board with SLI and I was thinking at some time in the future with that board I could add a second video card (when they're cheap) and get a 50% increase in power without having to give top $ for whatever the newest greatest card is.
Also they were running a raid 0 setup, would it be worth buying two drives and doing this (I keep my data on a slave so I don't care if I loose the data on the OS drives because of one bad drive in a raid 0 setup), or is it better to go with a 10,000RPM drive or not worry about any of it because it's possibly a small gain?