Out of Pod Experience

I am surprised to see that people actually still debate SSDs. I have mine for like two or three years now. Back then did everyone talk about it. My box still boots in 11s to the screen with it. When one wants to spend $1000 for a PC then it has to include an SSD or else you are missing out on a great experience. There is little point in getting an i7 and not having a fast storage device. One uses it for unpacking files, for audio and video encoding, as the boot drive, for frequently used documents, etc. With the introduction of SSDs into the mass market did the HDDs turn from storage devices into backup devices. Now one buys an SSD and just gets a slow, but huge HDD of 2-3 TBs for backup and mass storage.

Prices won't go down that much on current stuff. The new stuff will be a lot more expensive, rather than the old getting cheaper - You won't be buying a 2500k for less than $170 anytime soon.

Pay 220$ for a i5 3570K which is better than a i7 2600K that costs 320$ because it uses less watts and has better graphic parts and no hyperthread uglynes and has the same speed per core.

I think you just convinced me

Good.
Just invest some time and educate yourself a bit about them.
There´s already a wealth of harebrained tips around, like partitioning it (as mentioned in this thread). Most of these are from the early beginnings of the tech more than 2 years ago.
The current and also the last generation(SATA II) of SSDs are pretty solid.

For an 'enthusiast' casual user, those specs are wasted. A gtx 560 with a 2500k will serve you very well for the next couple of years. The CPU vastly outperforms any current game and anything that's in the works, at most you'd have to upgrade the gpu for a bit. As the ps3 and 360 still largely dictate game tech you simply don't need anything faster untill after a possible next gen console is released (which won't be untill 2014 at the earliest)

New hardware IS faster, but it doesn't really go much further than benchmarks which are absolutely pointless for the average user/gamer

That said, the ivy bridge GPU's are STILL crap. They can't even compete with budget gpu's from a few generations ago - Using them for anything other than pure office applications is currently pointless. I applaud the effort, but currently discrete gpu's are still a much better idea, especially since you can do the triple screen thing with a budget AMD card and soon the new budget 600 series cards from Nvidia aswell. Not to mention that to use the GPU on the CPU you need a much more expensive chipset to begin with which kind of compensates for the cost of a decent discrete budget card in the first place

Personally i'm running a 2500k on a P67 mobo. Overclocked it to 4GHz, but it didn't give me much gain - My current bottleneck seems to be my Radeon 6970 as far as gaming is concerned, my cpu has never broken any sweat whatsoever just yet, even when running 2 or 3 game clients at the same time (using an eyefinity setup here too by the way). I just don't see the point in holding out for new cpu's at the moment - Sandy bridges are absolutely awesome already. Yes, Ivy Bridge will be better, but the average user will not notice this at all, neither will the average or even enthusiast gamer.

Consumer CPU tech is running way past what's actually 'needed' nowadays. It'll take a while before the software actually starts making use of the current mid-end cpu's, let alone the new high-end stuff. Despite multi-core having become very popular since 2006, most software is STILL single-threaded, or has only rudimentary multicore support (2-4 threads at best). Waiting to buy the newest CPU is simply not necessary, especially since i expect the 2500k (imho by far the best buy at the moment for cpu's) won't drop in price untill mid next year at the earliest. The yields are stable and the cpu still sells like mad, Intel will be pricing the IB's up a bit due to this rather than price the SB's down. Given that AMD currently has nothing to compete with, Intel will be making use of the situation to recoup on some of their losses from the pricewar before the i-series was released

Unless you desperately want to use more than one monitor, a single gtx 560 or 570 will do very very nicely. The 600 series is currently massively overpowered and somewhat overpriced, it's not worth for the average used to wait for it - The 560 ti price is levelling out at the moment, it won't get that much cheaper, you'd save $20-30 at most unless you want to wait for the series AFTER the 600 series from Nvidia. AMD is also getting behind on the GPU tech at the moment aswell, hence the pricewar there won't be as critical as it was before now that Nvidia is taking over the top spot in the current cycle



As a general thought, "wait for the new hardware to come so the old gets cheaper" is a very old adagio that is self-perpetuating. After all, the hardware cycle moves at a VERY fast pace. Currently it has slowed down a bit since AMD is falling behind, but in general, there will ALWAYS be new hardware 'right around the corner'.

Forgive me it is only 27".

Even so, still the best bang for the buck in comparison which I was think was the whole point and as I can only speak for myself with an aging i7 920 and a more "up-to-date" 2500k that I built last year, the 2500k build was a mere fraction of what I paid for the 920 build, I know what I'd opt for even with newer stuff around the corner.

Depends on how Ivy Bridge is priced, of course but with all new technology I don't expect it to be cheap so it makes more sense for me to side-grade the 920 to another 2500k (or a 2600k even) and wait for Haswell and upgrade to a Ivy Bridge then.

Bolded for emphasis. If cost differences didn't matter everyone would get the most high end xxx version anyway ;p

Your setup looks all good.

Here you can see my current setup.