Originally Posted by Tacoma74

Screw the 2600k... waste of money compared to the 2500k. There is no way that 2mb L3 cache and hyperthreading (useless for gaming) is worth an extra $100+.

As far as SSD goes, it's really really not necessary at this point in time. Get 2 SATA III drives in Raid 0 and that is WAY MORE than sufficient for games. Even 7200 rpm SATA II drives are plenty fast still. SSD is way too expensive at this point.

8Gb of RAM is alright if you're running a 64 bit OS, but 4Gb is more than sufficient for years to come. It really depends how well it'll run by what kind of configuration you're running. What i mean by that is if your running say 4 x 2Gb sticks vs. 2 x 4Gb sticks. The latter is usually the better choice. Just remember the more sticks of RAM you have, the more stress it puts on the memory controller. This basically means that if you plan to overclock your RAM speeds and reduce timings, than you won't have near as much headroom without becoming unstable. Also make sure to get RAM that has a voltage under 1.65V to be safe. I've heard from several sources that the new memory controllers onboard the Sandy Bridge chips don't like high voltage RAM very much.

My 2 cents