Been using it for over 2 years, I have yet to have it "suck my balls".

Shame that would make it quite a popular technology.

core2duo 6600 £191.49 inc VAT

gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 £128.01 inc VAT

OCZ 2GB DDR2-900 PC2-7200 CL 5-5-5-15*SPECIAL OPS* EDITION KIT £199.98 inc VAT

Palit 8800GTX £374.98 inc VAT

Western Digital WD1600JS Caviar SE 160GBx2 (£38.05 each) £76.10 inc VAT

Sony DVD-rw drive Lots of choice, here. £20ish inc VAT

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 OEM PCI Soundcard £15.55 inc VAT

Antec NEO HE550GB 550W Modular PSU £70.38 inc VAT

The memory is faster without overclocking

The video card is far faster

Thats 80% faster hard disk system although admittedly with 180gb less space - my download habit just doesnt require 500gb yet. The price premium for a big single disk is huge over two smaller disks.

The sound card is lower spec, but still as good as any PC owner could need, Im still running that card. you wont find much of a system performance improvement from going for the later card.

The power supply might be delivering less wattage but its more than adequate for the parts quoted, I use it with those parts without a problem on two systems.

The difference inprice between the specs £2 the difference in performance in the real world would depend on what you are doing I play games at very high resolution where the difference oculd be as much as 30% higher frame rates for the £2 extra spent overall.

However I suspect your budget is well under £1000 Whats your budget? see what gets you best bang for buck.

resolution is kinda limited to 1440 x 900 :( which a gts should deal with pretty handily

RAID0 is not going to happen - with the possible exception of a synthetic(?) benchmark here or there, experience shows that it simply isn't any better than a single disk and the feeling of a "snappier" system is mostly placebo

Regardless of howmany drives you have if your drive goes down youve lost your data, and a lack of backup wont save you if you have one drive or two.

It will if you run a RAID-5 array.

Ive found raid-0 very good for sequential access, rather than big throughput, it does make a very noticeable difference on things like online games when loading multiple objects, but only if the bits of data you want ARE spread over the two disks. What I reall want is a decent size flash drive for that sort of performance... Bandwidth is rarely such an issue as seek time.

I still run old 19" crt monitors here so I run right up to 2048×1536, I like LCD monitors style wise, but I like high resolution for image quality. . its horses for courses, if you are running low res and have no desire to run hi res a cheaper card will do fine.

raid-5 IS a form of backup - although more for on the fly use than disaster recovery. It has its uses. But its not the simplest of systems. For a home PC I dont see as it has much benefit at all.

Far better to have a backup you can access, if one disks gone down format the remaining one and restore the most important bits of your backup to get you up and running. I wouldnt count raid-5 as being all the fault tollerance and backup you need either, a good storm can take out all your connected disks, BEst to have a disconnected backup elsewhere for important stuff. Raid 5 is far better for an important server which HAS to be kept up and running. And even then I would say its good practice to backup off site as well.

...what I really want is a decent size flash drive for that sort of performance...

ohhh, yes! I remember seeing a video of where XP had been installed onto a gigabyte(?) ram drive on either googlevideo or you tube - that was damn fast

ninja edit:

Gigabyte I-Ram - Google Video

I was programming an operating system for a system that used ram drives for long term storeage about 16 years ago now, although in those days it was something of a liability as the ram had to be kept powered which although it had a battery backup couldnt be relied on totally, The speed that stuff booted at and loaded documents at whipped the early hdd on PC's, Obviously in those days file sizes were somewhat smaller . But I could do a cold boot and be into the word processor in under 10 seconds

I reckon inside of a year those are finally going to make it into enthusiast pc's Catching up with what I was wanting 16 years ago I do remember using the ramdrive.sys?? something like that, functionality to run certain important files to on my PC's many years ago to speed up access .

i remember using that for the most important files/applications - doom and doom2