The only computers in this house which are store purchased and not assembled out components are the laptops. The case I'm using had an 300 meg Pentium one with Windows 95 install the motherboard could only take 64 meg SDRAM units. Of curse it now has in it Athlon 64, 3800+ and a gig of ram (approximately 6 mother boards later and three power supplies).

I would just get the basic PCI express add in video card, and unless you going to use an OS that supports more ram than windows XP 2 gig is the limit that it can use. VISTA has it's own problems and I would NOT consider it until after Vista SP1 (service pack 1).

The monitor get an 1080i wide screen if you can other wise an 720i monitor 900 by 1440 is nicer that the default square monitor (and a better picture to) and make sure it's DVI and VGA (digital and analog) the Dells you have to be careful on the ordering.

Forget about RAID unless you can use level 5 and have 4 or more hard drives in the array.

Bottom Line if you going to speed extra money on ram above 2 GIG just use that money to upgrade the monitor, and just about any add in video card is much better than using a built in video display.