Ah yes my area of expertise
What hard drive config is best? RAID 0, RAID 1 or SATA? Explain please.RAID 0 and 1 is whne you take two hard drives and basicly make htem act as one, in my case I have two 500GB HD's in RAID 0 it shows up in windows as 1 Terabyte HD. SATA is just the type of connection to the HD, Before SATA was IDE, SATA is much faster then IDE!
There are benefits and drawbacks to going with RAID.
RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across multiple disks in a way that gives improved speed at any given instant. If one disk fails, however, all of the data on the array will be lost, as there is neither parity nor mirroring. A RAID 0 array requires a minimum of two drives.
RAID 1 mirrors the contents of the disks, making a form of 1:1 ratio realtime backup. The contents of each disk in the array are identical to that of every other disk in the array. A RAID 1 array requires a minimum of two drives.
RAID 3 or 4 (striped disks with dedicated parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk. Fault tolerance is achieved by adding an extra disk to the array and dedicating it to storing parity information. The storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk. A RAID 3 or 4 array requires a minimum of three drives.
It goes on from there up to RAID 10 or (1+0)
Do I need an upgraded sound card for gaming or is the on board good enough?No, todays motherboards generally have High Definition on board sound and no extra card is needed.
What motherboard and chipset would you recommend and why?For gaming I always choose AMD, for some reason AMD just seems to game better then any other chipset plus its a ton cheaper then any others. You can get a nice Quad core for little to nothing from AMD. Plus AMD is making their stuff "future proof" as in their current motherboards will run their future CPU's. If you were not buying from Dell I would say a MSI or ASUS motherboard but Dell doesn't give you a choice.
I happen to know Dell favors Intell so if you have no choice the I5 or Core 2 duo would be fine.(Though I rather shoot myself in the foot then use them)
How much RAM is enough to keep up with the future of gaming over the next 5 years?I say about 4GB of RAM should be plenty and RAM is cheap to upgrade in the future.
How much power do I need for my power supply?Really depends on what your running as far as CPU, amount of drives and video card. I say 700watts for future proofing needs. Since your buying from Dell though they generally put in enough power to run everything
Does the PC case matter? (other than size and room for expansion)This is a yes and no answer, I go for full tower cases because of the breathing room, they tend to keep everything cooler because there is more room for airflow, not saying a mid tower won't do it either just not as well.
I noticed you didn't ask about a video card.
In that option I go with ATI, ATI & AMD are the same company now and pair well together, that and ATI has some of the best cards on the market currently. Coupled with the fact they are also much cheaper then the competition is and tend to have less driver issues.
If you have a price range in mind let me know I can go to Dell's website and configure something for you.
