Advice on building a new system

I am planning to build a new computer and would like some advice in selecting components.

First, I wanted to get people’s thoughts on using Linux’s software raid 10 with four disks for the ardour sessions. This would be in addition to a a disk for the system and /home.

Second, I was wondering if I there is any difference in using PCI or PCIe for the firewire card. I will be using it to connect my Presonus Firebox. It would seem that PCI has at least has enough bandwidth. Would one or the other give better latency? Would either one make much difference?

Finally, I wanted to solicit opinions on an ATI HD 4350 graphics card. I will probably use the open source x.org driver for it, which has 2D acceleration. I understand that 3D acceleration is in the works. Obviously, it’s not needed for recording (or necessarily desirable), but perhaps someday I’ll want to play around with Blender or something. I just want to make sure that the card won’t cause any problems when recording.

Thanks to anyone who can give useful advice.

I´m not quite into PCI/PCIe, but I think you have to make shure the firewire chipset is one recommended by FFADO, check that here:
http://www.ffado.org/?q=node/251

Roald

four disks for the ardour session sounds like absolute overkill… a 7200 RPM sata disk is generally more than enough for most people… unless your track count is in the 100’s … I have been using the OS disk as Raid 0 (with 2 disks) and recording disk as RAID 0 with 2 disks… and found it actually causes more vibrations…in the case which adds to background noise… just use a good filesystem for large file sizes (e.g. xfs) … and tune it well…