New gaming rig!

[magicstix]

Originally Posted by Arclight

Question is, do you want to spend that much money just to boost load times a bit? Not going to improve performance.

It'll improve performance and boot times. Memory paging will kill you if you're using a hard drive. Most games these days stream map files from the disk rather than load the whole thing.


Also, the sound card is probably a waste of money. It's not going to do anything that the onboard sound on the motherboard won't do.

[Task Force]

Myself i wouldn't get to complex with it.

Id go for the I5 2500K
what ever motherboard floats your boat.
A GTX 580, or its ATI equivalent.
6-8 GB of ram, you will probably never use it, but still.
myself i have a 700GB WD black. and it does perfectly fine
for cooling the stock ones are usually good enough. unless you are planning on superclocking it.

Because the more complex you get, the more of a chance it will mess up.

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by magicstix

It'll improve performance and boot times. Memory paging will kill you if you're using a hard drive. Most games these days stream map files from the disk rather than load the whole thing.

If your HD is fragmented or just slow, yes. It's up to devs to decide when they need something though; a game in which streaming is used properly will see no benefit from a SSD since streaming has no impact on it in the first place.

Also, we're talking about minor hick-ups at worst, not general performance. If you want to spend $200,- to smooth out minor stutters that only occur occasionally, then by all means. For me it's just not worth it.