I7 or phenomII 810 & SSD?

a 30 gb ssd drive will barely be enough for your OS, so anything stored outside that drive will load at normal speeds. So unless windows loading really fast is really important to you I would go with the i7.

The Phenom II will feel quicker, the i7 will have more grunt overall

The SSD wont help anywhere BUT in loading times etc

Its up to you to decide, if it was me i would either save more $$$ for the SSD or use a regular hdd and eventually upgrade to an SSD with the i7 rig - cant be beat.

I'd get a Phenom 720 with 4GB (remember, AM3 uses dual channel memory, not triple channel) DDR3 and two Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID 0.

^ you can when its a biostar....lol.... its better to pay for a board than use that one.........all boards are not created equal

I do agree with the PII 940 though it is deffinitely worth the consideration....... I now have two 940's/HD4870x2, an 810/HD4870, 955/GTX280, 720/HD3850x2, two 7750/GF8200, two 5800+/onboard, Atom 330, two P4 extreme dual @3.73ghz and a host of others. All five PII that I own are for gaming. I have found that for the price I cannot beat the 940 for power and IPC requirements. As for the AM3 it is nice but not necessary right now. The performance gain over DDR2 1066 is not sufficient enough to merit use of this for me right now. I borrowed my brothers i7 965/gtx295 setup for a while (swap for my 955/gtx280), the gains I saw were there, but again for me not enough to blow the extra cash. When it came to encoding ripped movies (as i do frequently), the performance increase and the less time it took to encode to H.264 HD 1080 was incredible. This fact alone has cuased me to raise the eyebrows and consider getting one for this purpose alone.