Can anyone give me any guidance on buying memory? Putting together a system, want to max out the memory from the go. I've gone on newegg, and look at the 240 pin dins, and my head spins, don't know what all is what, and which is the way to go. Any help/advice, or even a link to a post or article that might give me some incite, would be appreciated.

Going with

I7 980x hexacore
ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
EVGA GeForce GTX470 Superclocked 1280 MB DDR5 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card 012-P3-1472-AR

Thats what I'm looking at so far.
Still figuring out drives.

Thinking
SSD for C: drive, for OS, and programs,
Then either 2 other drives (7200rpm), one for footage drive, and other for render drive.

Any detailed info on RAID configuration would be appreciated. Would I go with two RAID 0 configurations? In place of the 2 drives above? Or what is recommended?

But the main thing I hope to get info on is what I need to look at, when shopping for memory?

Thanks,
Jeff

depends on case size and power.

You need DDR3 memory; i have 6x2 GB Corsair XMS3 at 1600Mhz that im overclocking on a Rampage III Gene (Micro ATX) with an i7 950 that will also be overclocked.

Corsairs' Dominator series is a good buy, so is Mushkin. RAM speeds wont affect render times as much as the AMOUNT of ram you have.

Despite the fact that i have a Micro ATX case, i have managed to fit 4 identical 2.5" SATA II laptop hard drives (160GB x2 in RAID0, and also 160GB x2 in RAID0 one for project and one for cache), an SSD for boot/OS/CS5, and a 1TB SATA II for media storage, with external backup.

The RAID0 drives dont have to be big, and you dont store anything on them, as they will likely fail or corrupt you just use them as project disks and use a 4th as the destination disk or copy to it after export. I bought laptop HDD's because they are physically smaller and i can fit 4 in a 5.25" bay, as well as the SSD and 1TB disk. I keep a spare 7200RPM laptop drive in case one of my 4 fails or cannot be reused, but i use this rig on sets at times so it has to be compact.

RAID5 is ideal with 4+ disks (identical) but you would need a better RAID controller card (ARECA's are great but pricey). Ideally, on our next PC build, we will be using the same processor and motherboard as yourself with 24GB RAM, as well as a similar graphics card, and 4 RAID5 6 disk arrays with appropriate RAID controller card(s) with separate power supplies. It will be a big fat ugly box, but it will be fast and powerful. That should theoretically max out SATA II and put our premiere machine at the top of editing systems.