yeah, i choose more external backups not plugged in, no amount of extra RAID disks can protect against virus, theft, user error, or cat walking on your keyboard. 1 disk is quieter and less power too.


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On your motherboard/video card thing. so far you've got a motherboard with builtin graphics and no graphics card. fair enough, but:


- I don't know if you can plug in two monitors, you'll have to check the motherboard manual if you can get one before buying. If you get an nVidia graphics card then you can use 2 of the 3 outputs (per card) at once. The latest Radeon cards with Eyefinity or whatever it's called, you can plug in god knows how many monitors per card, i think displayport daisychains even (but you'll probably need a high-end card)


- motherboard graphics will chew up your system RAM because they don't have their own. 8GB should be more than enough as it is, hurts most on games. How many 21megapixel 16bit TIFFs do you layer on top of each other at once? Even the lowest end card will help a bit if you do.


- motherboard itself, you *might* get away with plugging in the new am3+ CPUs into that board (best research it if you really want to). If not, you can always buy my x6 if/when i go to 8-core


- also, only the AMD 900-series chipset take the AM3+ cpus. but none of them have builtin graphics. so if you go up there, add another $40 for a basic graphics card too.


- with the RAM speed, i keep seeing things that say the lowest-end Athlon-100 series are limited to 1333-speed. i'll update tomorrow (or whenever the package arrives) as to how i get on with a phenom2 and 1600 RAM, i think i'll be fine though.


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ps, and my PSU is 80% efficient. never heard of the brand you got, but there's a lot more choice in the states i've ever heard of...