[Dean]

I almost prefer periodic backup to 1 or more eSATA externals that you can even take off-site over RAID. RAID is not backup. It writes garbage or deletes files on both drives in real time which can screw you big time. eSata is also way faster than burning blu-rays. Most optical media is not considered to be "backup" quality, especially RW.

RAID 1 does not require the same HW to recover, but there are no guarantees the HALs will match from one MB to the next enough to boot. I don't think they fixed that in 7.

Have you looked at equivalent HP/Dell systems just for price comparison and warranty.

And I would not overclock any machine being used for business. Asking for trouble. If that is why you are buying a specific processor or MB, don't. Pay for the speed you need and just enough MB to support it.

Even without the Display, you are way over $1000 for a desktop. That is quite pricey.

I play 720P Blu-ray H264/divx/whatever on a 3Ghz. P4 XP laptop with a 1Gb RAM 5400RPM drive and 128Meg Radeon 9700 which is way more work than playing the raw file off a Blu-ray disc. Something else is wrong with your system if you can't on any 1.6+ghz dual core.

I am not an expert, but photoshop and video editing are mostly linear applications. They will have little benefit from > 2 cores and no benefit from high end video cards other than possibly video RAM. 2D performance is all you have described a need for. Maybe fast memory for paging large images.

I just feel like you should be able to buy an appropriate system off the shelf with a warranty for $700 or less. It just feels like you are trying to build more of a gaming system than a video/still editing system.