Gaming Computer Upgrade

Hello,
I am in the process of upgrading a 4 year old gaming computer.

Approximate Purchase Date: Jan or Feb of 2011


Budget Range: (e.g.: not more than $1000) After Rebates


System Usage from Most to Least Important: (e.g.: gaming, surfing the internet, watching movies)


Parts Not Required: (e.g.: keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers,) Power Supply 500 Watt OCZ 500-SXS


Preferred Website(s) for Parts: (e.g.: newegg.com, tigerdirect.com


Country of Origin: US



Overclocking: possibly


SLI or Crossfire: No for now, yes in the future


Monitor Resolution: (e.g.: 1920x1080, 1920x1200)


Operating System: Windows 7 32 bit currently. Will upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit at time of hardware upgrade.


Here is what I am considering:
Processor I5-760 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] Tpk=i5-760
Motherboard ASUS P7P55D-E Pro HTTP://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product
Ram 8 GB total, Two 4GB G. Skill 9-9-9-24 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] CL9D-8GBRL
Video Card - One Radeon HD-6870 for now (can add a second card in the future). http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product
Hard Drive - Not sure what I want to do here.

Any thoughts if i am on the write path or not.

I just bought a very similar setup ( still waiting on products to come in). From what I can see it looks good but FYI your links are bad. I don't know what happens but I know I linked some stuff a few days ago and it did the exact same thing what your did.

I only had 4gb of RAM because I have 8gb DDR2 in my system right now and I've never utilized even 60% or so lol but having to much is always a good thing compared to the latter.

The only thing I did different was I got a SSD for a boot/game drive. You can have the best components in the world but if your HDD is lacking it all bottlenecks there.

I don't know what your $ is as you currently sit with those products but you can get 60-80gb SSD now for a little over 100$ or so such as
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227550

Anyways hope that helps.

I don't know if 500w PSU is enough power.

http://www.antec.outervision.com/PSUEngine

Plug your products in there and see. (another user posted that link sorry forgot the name =(

that's exactly right. Save larger files on the HDD and any apps/games you want performance out of put on the SDD.

With SDD's still fairly high $ per gb it's hard to buy a large enough drive to put everything on just the SDD but they have dropped and will continue to drop with the newer SDD's coming out soon.

Note on the game performance: Only load times of maps or anytime is has to read from the SDD is the only time your going to see a performance increase.