As far as the drives go, RAID 0 would give you fast output, but not as fast as SCSI. The SCSI will run warmer (slightly), but SCSI drives are handtouched at the factories. This "hand-touching" is why SCSI drives have a longer warranty and can withstand a little more abuse than IDE drives. I personally would stick with a SCSI, even maybe a 15,000 RPM drive.
As for the video, what are you going to do with a 64-bit processor
? Windows XP 64-bit is in very early beta, but there are several Linux distributions that offer 64-bit versions. The only thing is, if it's for games and graphics, which programs do you know of support 64-bit queueing and extensions? None really that I can think of. If you get a Pentium 4 with HT (hyper-threading), then you essentially get a dual processor system with only one processor. There are many programs that take advantage of SMP (symmetric multi-processing). Photoshop is one of these programs. As much as I support AMD, Intel's P4 is the faster consumer chip on the market. I would just tell you to get it. I just don't see the need for you to buy a 64-bit chip with a 32-bit OS running on top of it, because you really end up just wasting the 64-bit part of it. You pay extra for it, but get nothing out of it.
As far as the video goes, the Nvidia SLi cards for the PCI Express bus look very promising. Nvidia is creating cards with SLi (Scalable Link interface) that will allow two video cards in the system to work in tandem with each other. Both cards will be PCI Express, have the SLi connector connected to both of them, and the monitor will have two inputs on it. One video card will control the bottom half of the screen while the other video card controls the top half. You have a very powerful video card now only having to do half of the work as compared to if it were a stand-alone card.
A couple of last thoughts......you are going to want to look at SATA drives instead of IDE. The cables are MUCH smaller and will allow more airflow and there is no jumpering of the drives. Also, SATA drives start at 133mbit transfer bus whereas IDE tops out at 133mbit transfer rate. As far as the video, I currently am using an ATI 9800 Pro 128mb video card in my desktop machine and it performs extremely well. You should be able to find one quite cheap now that newer video cards are coming out. Lastly, I would not purchase the fast things on the market. Save some money by purchasing conservatively as new things come out all the time, especially processors. When the P4 3Ghz processors first came out, they were ~$600 more than their 2Ghz+ counterparts. Image $600 for 200Mhz that you really would not notice.
Any questions, email me at
bendsley@gmail.com and I will try to answer what I can.