I am currently enrolled in Industrial Engineering here at NC State and have had nothing but good experiences since I came here in 2007. Life in Raleigh is great and in my opinion is the best city in NC by far. It is a smaller city in comparison to Charlotte but larger in comparison to Chapel Hill. We are only minutes away from the Research Triangle Park, giving NCSU an advantage when it comes to jobs and internships. There is plenty to do around Raleigh on a non academic level as well. Within walking distance of NC State's campus are many bars and restaurants. Hillsbourough Street is one of the main roads around NCSU that gets a lot of foot traffic. There are a lot of good spots to hang out on Hillsbourough St including a bowling alley, lots of bars, and lots of restaurants. In Downtown Raleigh there are more bars and restaurants, as well as clubs, museums, art galleries, concert ampitheaters, and the list goes on and on. It is free to take the bus downtown if you are an NCSU student but if you are coming or going after 10pm a cab is going to be your best bet, usually about 10 dollars if you go alone but gets much cheaper if you go with friends. I'm not sure how much money is spent day to day but I'll give you an estimate of how much I spend in a month, I live off campus so this might differ from what you are looking for.
All of these numbers can be greatly reduced by living on campus and taking advantage of free university events.
In comparison to other universities in North Carolina and across the nation, NC State is as good as any of the others. After being in the college system for a while and having friends at many other universities, I have seen that there are some real differences in the collegiate realm. First of all I would say that I have enjoyed being at a technical school much more than a liberal school such as UNC. I go to UNC to see some friends probably once a month and the people that I have met through them fail to use logic most of the time, which gets annoying. I like to solve real world problems and that is hard to come by at a liberal school. I also have met many people from other engineering schools and they always regard NC State's College of Engineering as a great school. Employers in the area love NC State graduates and even send job applications to NCSU that no one in the public ever sees. The point being that employers favor our grads. As far as rankings go, I don't believe that standardizing a universtiy to compare it to others is fair. Duke and Chapel Hill almost always rank higher than NC State overall but both have law and medical schools, neither of which is offered here. If engineering is your plan then UNC is out because there are no engineering degrees offered. Duke has an engineering school but it is not as good as ours and costs 6 times as much as State. As you can see I do not hold rankings very high but I guess they have their place.
Overall I think that NC State is a great place to go to school and as someone who grew up in a house of UNC fans, my mom went to UNC, I was a bit nervous about choosing State over UNC. Looking back it is the best decision I've ever made and would do it the same if given the chance. If you have anymore questions, just let me know.