Hi there and thanks for your reply. It might help my question if I make a bit more clear.

Client use(d) the dual 2.5 G5 for two outputs, through the builtin vga card.

What the system should minimally be able to do flawlessly on each output is :

mix, crossfade and load
- 1 layer for masking (jpeg or vfx)
- 2 layers for playback of DV footage.

+ They'd prefer not to upgrade to 4.x, but stick to the 3.x version for the time being.
++ The old 2.5 had a raidcard in a pci slot, this has to be changed indeed, for some kind of pci-e slot or a fw800 raid solution like you mentioned.

Anyone ?