Thanks for the input guys!

In the end my father opted to go with his familiar store and get a custom built machine. He's the one paying (it's a grad present, hooray for earning my degree!) so I'm not going to throw out any complaints.

The final specs are:

Quote :

Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Processor
Corsair Vengeance Heatspreader 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 DIMMs
Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX) 1000GB (1TB) SATA3 7200RPM 64MB Cache (Three of these... I have a lot of storage need these days)
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 FleX 2GB GDDR5 GDDR5(5000MHz) Memory Dual DVI /HDMI/Dual Mini Display

I'll upgrade in a year or so if I find I need to, but at the moment I'm only really playing RBR and LFS so my gaming side is a little low on resource needs for now. Too busy working to get into anything new.

Well... um... I don't think you'll need an upgrade for a while.

Oh dear... Can you tell me where he got all that for your budget of $1100?

Either I am jealous or I hate you right now, I can't tell.

With 3 HDD's, you should RAID-5 them. You'll lose 1 out of 3 TB as for storage space, but your storage will be redundant (meaning that, if any of HDDs dies - you won't lose ANY data). + read/write speed will be doubled.

Also, if that's a reference design card, you can unlock it into HD 6970.

Quote from E.Reiljans :

With 3 HDD's, you should RAID-5 them. You'll lose 1 out of 3 TB as for storage space, but your storage will be redundant (meaning that, if any of HDDs dies - you won't lose ANY data). + read/write speed will be doubled.

raid 5 with 3 disks is the lowest you can go. if you lose a disk, you lose the array. a 2-disk raid 5 is essentially a mirror, in the places that allow it.

in other words, buy another disk if you require redundancy.

Quote from bunder9999 :

raid 5 with 3 disks is the lowest you can go. if you lose a disk, you lose the array. a 2-disk raid 5 is essentially a mirror, in the places that allow it.

in other words, buy another disk if you require redundancy.

Um, no. 3-disk RAID-5 is not 'degraded' (aka "lose a disk -> lose array"). 3 disk RAID-5 is fine, and even after one disk fails, it still works (but in 'degraded' state).

Quote from PMD9409 :

Oh dear... Can you tell me where he got all that for your budget of $1100?

Either I am jealous or I hate you right now, I can't tell.

My budget wound up increasing. That lot came to $2034 and change for the full tower with labour and warranty and such

Nearly doubled your budget, thats the spirit!

Rig is all done, I'm pickin it up on Sunday. Probably be another month before I will actually get to try it out proper...