Building a machine

[kandrathe]

Question: how bad to I need RAID? At present, I am using machines as PC's and do not see turning my gaming machine into a serious server. Any side benefits of RAID that I am missing?

Gamers use Raid 0 because it allows you to stripe the data onto the drives such that both drives contribute to each block of data retrieved, or in other words it doubles your IO rate.

At work on the servers we use Raid 50 which is a combination of Raid 5 and Raid 0. We get the speed advantage of striping across the number of disks used (we use 5 hot swappable 80 GB 15000 rpm drives typically) and also the advantage of 2 bit error correction redundancy on each data word stored. The down side of Raid 5 is that you consume quite alot of space to provide for the error correction.

Do I really nead an additional internal "surge protector" when I have a UPS, Surge protector, and the Power Supply already in between Mo Board and the wall socket?

No. UPS should clean up the power fine. What kills electronic components, and especially transformers is when they are under, or over powered. The transformer either needs to draw more amps to compensate for under power which results in more resistance (heat), or offload the over power as heat. So if your PS is rated for 110v then that is the optimum volatage for the transformer. I've seen my home power vary to as low as 90v and as high as 130v.

Question: What's the big deal abouty Gigabyte Lan ports? Leaning into the future, like Quadraphonic sound? Useless gold plating? Or, is it the next step in Broad band in the next few years?

Not unless you plan on some massive home network, or VOIP at home. 1000 Megabits/second is faster than your broadband, and so your cable or DSL will still be the slowest link in the chain.

What CFM rating is best for an 80mm case fan? I see 34 CFM (Cubic Feet Per Minute) on most of the fans at my local store, is that pretty much an industry standard for an 80mm mounting?

Higher CFM than 34 on an 80mm fan means they are faster and louder. I look at CFM(airflow), RPM (speed), MTBF (durability), and DB (noise).