Opinions on this PC please

[Reilly311]

Please tell me if you think I can get something better, or, save some money. Thanks!

3.40 GHz Pentium® 4 Processor w/ HT Tech Extreme Edition
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
256MB PCI Expressâ„¢ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeonâ„¢ X800 XT
800GB RAID 0 HD (whats the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1)
Sound Blaster Audigyâ„¢2 (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1, and IEEE 1394 capability

 

[mczak]

Please tell me if you think I can get something better, or, save some money. Thanks!

Money is not limited?

3.40 GHz Pentium® 4 Processor w/ HT Tech Extreme Edition

For gaming, even a lovely A64 3500+ beats that, as well as for a couple of other things. Depends on what you want to do primarily with the PC if A64 or P4 is faster.

4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz

What about the motherboard? Looks like you've opted for a i925 based board. That's fine, performance isn't really better though than with i875 based boards (not worse neither). 4GB DDR2 SDRAM probably costs a fortune, and I'm no fan of 4GB setups - since only about 3.5GB will be available, due to that 32bit address space which also includes things like AGP aperture and PCI bios space. Also, very few "normal" applications exist which would really benefit from more than 1GB of ram today.

256MB PCI Expressâ„¢ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeonâ„¢ X800 XT

Availability? Some people might prefer the (unavailable as well) Nvidia GF6800U instead.

800GB RAID 0 HD (whats the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1)

RAID0 (striping) is useless, http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 RAID1 (mirroring) is for data safety, though it will half the available HD space.

Sound Blaster Audigyâ„¢2 (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1, and IEEE 1394 capability

Compared to the other components, this sounds (no pun intended...) almost cheap

 

[cristic]

An A64 paired with a 64-bit OS could make better use of 4 gigs of ram, because of its extended address range. Though right now the things really needing 4GB are hard to find...

And about RAID-0 performance, the article at Anand is a little flawed, you should also read the comments posted by the readers.

 

[ZoinKs!]

Please tell me if you think I can get something better, or, save some money. Thanks!

3.40 GHz Pentium® 4 Processor w/ HT Tech Extreme Edition
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
256MB PCI Expressâ„¢ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeonâ„¢ X800 XT
800GB RAID 0 HD (whats the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1)
Sound Blaster Audigyâ„¢2 (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1, and IEEE 1394 capability

If you want to get something better and save some money, look into Athlon 64's.

Out of curiousity, what will this machine be used for? I'm wondering what applications you'll be running and why you need so much ram and hard disk storage.