Another attempt -- my phenom ii x4 955 build

Earlier I posted an i7 920 build in here, and you guys gave me some nice feedback.



I'd like to try this again, a bit cheaper, with a Phenom II X4 955 and a bit bigger monitor.

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: late October / early November 2009
BUDGET RANGE: around $1,500
SYSTEM USAGE: general gaming and internet
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: U.S.A.
OVERCLOCKING: Willing but inexperienced.
SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Initially no, but I'd be open to crossfire (adding another GPU) down the road one day.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1360x768
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: This would be a little PC to sit next to the coffeetable, so I'd like to stay in the smallish case. It'd be mostly for the wife, and I'd ultimately network it to my existing PC. Also, we'd rather not have a huge monitor for that location. The wife plays Eve Online, Sims 2, etc., but the worst thing she does (imo) is play lots of facebook games that are always running in the background. When those things are on it makes it almost impossible for me to do anything. She also never closes Chikka, YIM, etc. (My current PC is just a single core pentium 4 [5 yrs old], so I'm thinking she may need all the cores she can get to run her stuff.)

Case: Silverstone SST-SG04B MicroATX Case ($149.99)
Motherboard: Asus M4A785TD-M EVO MicroATX ($094.99)
Processor: AMD Phenom II x4 955 ($189.00)
Memory: Kingston 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR3 ECC Unbuffered 1333 KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G ($207.98)
Video card: Asus EAH4870 Dark Knight 1GB ($134.99)
Power supply: Silverstone DA700 Crossfire Ready Modular PSU ($109.99)
Monitor: SAMSUNG LD190N (Lapfit) High Glossy Black 18.5" 5ms Widescreen LCD ($129.99)
Hard drive: WD Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb x 2 (two for a RAID setup) ($119.98)
Optical drive: ASUS Black Internal Blu-Ray / DVD / Combo Drive ($104.99)
Keyboard and Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 V2 ($059.99)
Operating System: Windows Vista (Home Premium) 64 bit w/ Windows 7 upgrade coupon ($109.99)

Subtotal: $1411.88

Questions as I'm considering this build:

1) Are people able to run two hard drives on RAID when they'd have to share a SATA cable with the optical drive? I think I read somewhere that some guy's BIOS got confused and tried to put the optical on RAID too, and he could never get it to work right. Then he switched back to an IDE optical drive, and things worked better. If this type of headache could be avoided with planning, I'd like to avoid it.

2) What would it take for me to slightly overclock my Phenom 955 to make it equivalent to the 965?

3) Would it possibly be smart of me to downgrade the GPU to a ATI Radeon HD 3400 series so I can hybrid crossfire with the integrated graphics? It just seems disappointing to me that they boast hybrid crossfire as a feature, but we can't use any sexy cards with it.

Thanks so much for your time and consideration. You guys are sure friendly.