Holy hopping snot! If anybody had told me I'd spend over $400 bucks for just a video card I'd never have believed it....
However, having decided that my XP 3200+-driven Mb with 2 gb of 3200 ram wasn't quite ready for the trash heap, I plunked down for the last AGP card I'll ever buy....an ATI Radeon x850xt Platinum.

Who hoooo....after finally taking out the old 9700 all-in-wonder, this thing kicks ass....I had to run out and buy Doom 3 and Battlefield 2 just to appreciate the frame rates...

Can anyone point me towards a good "speed check" program to analyse performance in a system?

Also, I've had two 160gb Segate drives running striped as external SATA in a small box and had another question: If I want to run RAID 0+1, and I buy a "4 into 3" RAID cage, will it come with it's own backplane/controller? Can I skip this step? What about a port multiplier and a multilane SATA cable? Worth the expense?

ANy advice much appreciated.

Quoted: Holy hopping snot! If anybody had told me I'd spend over $400 bucks for just a video card I'd never have believed it....

I know what you mean. If anybody would have told me that I was going to spend close to 3k on a 64 4000+ build, I would say they were crazy. I'm the crazy one. mmk   BTW Robbie that's some funny shit. mmk