What Ynsaen said. With my opinion points added. 1)RE: Video card vs integrated. Mobo makers are in a bit of a transition at the moment, getting out silicon that plays nice with Shader 3 and PCI-E, so anything you get is going to pretty much be version 1 hardware. Probably more importantly, the onboard video grabs a section of your system ram for display purposes. I've gotten to where I prefer the video card approach; I can go cheap as fancy effects aren't needed, and it keeps almost all the video work segregated. And if a card blows, it's an easy task to swap out, load new drivers, and keep going. Sometimes getting a system to forget that the integrated video chip it has isn't needed anymore is....annoying, shall we say? 2)Drives. With the current speed of hard drives, about the only thing RAID would be good for would be to create a mirror in case one of the main drives goes boom. Nearly all new motherboards have both PATA and SATA ports. PATA is still the most compatible, so putting the OS on a drive on the primary parallel port is the best. But you could use the first SATA port for a drive dedicated to the swapfile (you can get 40gig SATA's for relatively little $$$, and the parallel equivalent would be an ultra 150. Not a lot of increase, but enough to add a couple of percent to performance). And as many of the boards out there have some RAID function built in, you might want to consider using that to create a mirror of your -data- drive; that way a drive going boom won't trash your runtime (don't even think about putting the resource data on the boot drive; the less there, the better, and the easier it is to create a disc image to DVD). The only issue with SATA drives I've had is heat; they run hotter than PATA drives, and being jammed against another drive with no air circulation will kill one pretty quickly.