Help building a nice gaming computer

Do some pricing on what I suggested and see where it comes out and we can go from there.

It is good to get a degree of future compatibility in place where you can but be mindful of the premium you pay for it - for me personally I rarely use USB devices so USB 3.0 support wouldn't be a selling point on a mobo, but having hefty overclocking capabilities and/or support for 3-way graphics cards is a good investment.

I was also looking at the HX1000 for my PSU for exactly the same reasons, but I was looking at the power consumption of my possible 3-way GTX285 as the benchmark - graphics cards are drawing less juice with every generation, and realistically you could probably run 3 5870s on a high-quality 850W (like the HX850) while still clocking a D0 i7 920 to 4GHz, which is much more likely the route I'm going now (unless Fermi rocks - by the time I can build properly Fermi gaming cards should be out).

Regarding overclocking, it's really easy to give the i7 920 a boost up to 3.3GHz straight away - significant overclocks aren't too difficult either. But personally 4GHz is enough for even extreme gamers and you can cool that sucker on air.

Going higher than 4GHz is for the expert clocker and bencher and only then will watercooling come into its own - unless you want a sexy rig (don't we all, but you can do that on air too) or near-silence there's little point in watercooling for anything lower than 4GHz.

As far as the RAID goes, yes it will give you great I/O performance but you're increasing the chance of data loss with it - if one drive goes the whole stripe goes with it. Now granted, the chances of a hard drive failing are like a million to one, but having 2 of them in a RAID makes that 1 in 500,000, 3 is 1 in 333,333, etc, etc.

It's not a problem though if you don't have irreplaceable data on it - as long as game saves, your documents and whatnot are on a back-up or non-RAID drive it doesn't really matter. RAID goes down and you lose your OS? No big, just fix the RAID and reinstall.

If you can stretch it then fast boot and game loading time is now in the domain of the SSD, but good ones are pricey.

So given what I said about the RAID, you could still do a pair of SpinPoint F3 500GB in a RAID 0 and have the 1TB SpinPoint F3 for data if you want the performance but can't stretch the SSD.