nihil, an upgrade may well be the best solution, but my presumption was that if this guy was looking to purchase a new comp, then his current one mustnt be up to much.
Going by the specs he has mentioned, i dont know why hes looking to upgrade for the purposes he mentioned, karbon?
Why in the mother of god do you need 1tb of hdd space for personal use? Thats just ridiculous! You ever hear of backups?
Also why would you want/need a raid configuration? All you need to implement raid is an os that supports raid. That is unless you want to splash out a heap of money on some server h/w.

Edit:
Be careful? at the moment hardware is in advance of most software so these "kiddies bragging rights" thingies are pretty much irrelevant?
Im not sure what you mean by this...im assuming youre referring to the 64 bit os comment i made? If so then if youre planning on buying a new box to play with for the next 5 years, then i would recommend buying a mobo with 64 bit support. Within the next year s/w will be available in 64 bit to match the upcoming os, so the s/w aint that far behind the h/w.