Thinking of building a new computer

[KlassicCrayola]

Hey I'm thinking of building a new computer, mostly for gaming and regular desktop purposes, but I have no idea where to start. I know the basic parts like the CPU, video card, hard drive, etc. but I have no idea which ones are nice or will serve my purpose best. There are also some terms I was wondering about- what is overclocking and how do you do it, and what is RAID? Thanks in advance.

 

[Northbridge]

RAID means random array of independent disks. RAID is used if a computer has two or more hard drives.
The two most commonly used levels of RAID are RAID 0 and RAID 1.
RAID 0 offers a faster way of coping data to two hard drives, in Raid 0's case half of a file goes to one drive and the other half goes to the remaining drive.
RAID 1 one is slower than RAID 0 . RAID 1 copies data identically to both drives so if one drive fails you won't lose your data.

CPUs and video cards all depend on personal preference.You could could ask all of the members that. I myself suggest an AMD Athlon 64 CPU.

With video cards I am not biased toward Nvidia or ATI. You should get either one's new series of cards that are about to come out. IF YOU CAN wait until PCI Express video cards,DDR2 memory,and BTX motherboards come out.

 

[modemide]

I'm not sure if you picked up on this or not ... but RAID 1 is used to have another copy of stuff just in case one hard drive fails like northbridge said. However, you should also note that in RAID 0 since you are writing parts of files to each drive, if one drive fails you will lose all of your data. It is also adjustable how much of each file is split .. EG:
you can make 16 kb blocks which means that each drive will be read/written 32 kb at a time (16 from each hard drive). For video and such they use larger blocks, this is just an example.

 

[oblivion]

check out this computer someone set up for me...it would cost around $1300 without a monitor and an OS.

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17499