Mid-range computer for 2D design and some light gaming

I posted a thread about this a while ago, some time has passed and the build has changed a fair bit, so here it is, submitted for your comments:

Cabinet Antec Three Hundred
Cooling paste Arctic Silver Arctic Silver 5
Mobo Asus P5Q Pro
Power Corsair TX 650W
CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
Optical Nec AD-7203S
HD Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB SATA2 (4 of them for RAID 10)
CPUcooler Thermaltake Blue Orb II
Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD 4850
RAM Corsair Dominator TWIN2X8500C5D 4096MB, DDR2,2x2GB

Questions and comments:

Am I good to go with RAID10 or will I have to buy something extra?

I'm investing a bit in the graphics card due to the work Nvidia did with Adobe for CS4 - does this mean I'll be better off with a card from Nvidia?

There are no prices listed because I'm buying this in Norway, but it'll cost around 9000 NOK, which, according to google, is about 1300 USD.

I've messed around with computer-guts before, but this is my first complete build, so be kind

i would go with 2x 500 gb like groo mentioned.

(i know you live in norway, but i'm just linking to the the product so you can see)

WD 6400 AAKS 640gb hd.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136218

i would also drop the Q9400, if you're gonna go for a 45nm quad, you should invest a little bit more and get the Q9550 because of the 12mb L2 cache compared to the Q9400's 6mb

BUT...you stated you want a comp for 2d design and light gaming, so i would recommend you drop the Q9400 all together and instead go with a Q6600 and do a light OC on it to 3.0ghz, save some money

2 faster, larger HDDs should be cheaper than the 4 you mentioned.
as the onboard controler might not give you that much of a speed bonus for raid 10, a raid 1 made of bigger faster HDDs might give comperable performance.

1 great big one should be even cheaper.

I've never used matrix arrays. Its an Inel thing. my desktop is AMD
my understanding is that you break up the HDD into partitions, then raid 0 i partion from each drive and raid 1 another partition from each drive.

not all Intel southbridges do this, not sure about the one you listed.

the best way to save money would be to downgrade to DDR2 800

2 ways, intentionaly slow portions of the system and see how much it affect the performance doing what you want
or just look at the individual vista scores.
obviosly the first one is better and the second one is easier, but your whole system will probably give 5.9s.

I realy don't think your bottlenecking for your intended task. for gaming, your a bit high on CPU and a little low on GPU.

I think the q9550 is a good move for you. the only other possible consideration would be upgrading to 8 gigs of system memory if CS4 is optimised for 64 bit. but I've never looked into the heart of the Adobe Creative Suite.

you might want to find some adobe forum to ask about the memory and vid card.