I just got a new PC, should be good for a couple years.

If you can afford it, I suggest you get an OCZ vertex SSD as your main system drive. Its the best bang for the buck you can spend to improve your general PC experience.

erm, what's that? lol.

Its a non mechanical drive, essentially it excels at random reads and lots of operations at once.

In a nutshell its the antidote to 'windows has too many programs and its going dirt slow' syndrome.

No, it's not that large in games. It's much larger in video encoding and server apps, but I assume this is a gaming computer. For gaming, as I said in the PM, the processors are priced according to their performance, so buying more expensive will always be faster. So a Core i7 920 ($290) is faster than a Core 2 Quad Q9550 ($280) and a Phenom II X4 940 ($225) but slower than a Core 2 Quad Q9650 ($325)*. But I wouldn't recommend anything more expensive than a Core i7 920 as the performance/value isn't there.

The "difference" between a "regular quad-core" and a Core i7 is architecture. Core i7s are newer than Core 2 Quads. But what des it matter what the chip is like inside as long as it performs well? Don't be taken in by the numbers and marketing speak; performance and price are all that matters. And don't dismiss AMD quad-cores either.

*Yes, prices in USD, but should be about the same hierarchy in the UK.

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As for SSDs:

- They are relatively new and are very expensive for small capacities
- The main benefit is a slight decrease (maybe 20%) in boot time and game loading times.
- It could be difficult to set up two hard drives (one SSD, one HDD) to put Windows on one drive and your games on another.

Check out the Anand article on SSDs.

The huge advantage lies in random write/read speeds and latency. A SSD performs significantly better in this regard.

Wow. Those were much better numbers than I expected. OK, I'll change my position to 50% improvement in loading times for all applications. It's not really worth talking in terms of latency or read speeds; the real-world effects are more important.

random writes is the word of the day, every day is like a fresh windows install.

the guy in the store said he would quote me a price tomorrow as i sent him some specs that you guys told me. i hope you guys will still be around to comment before i actually buy the thing.

 lol, funny!