Intel i5 and new motherboard

Soo my opinion is your system is quite good as is. Are you having issues with games or other items? Here are my thought's on each key feature you pointed out.

PCI-E 3.0 - I do not believe there is any graphics card that fully utilizes the PCI-E 2.0 x16 bus. So at the moment there really is no need to have 3.0.

USB 3.0 - You can always get a small expansion card for USB 3.0 for $20.

SATA III - I can see the argument for this, however, I don't feel it is worth the mobo/CPU upgrade just to get this. I thought about this as well before getting an SSD. However, your average transfers are not over 300MB/s (the max for SATAII). Sequentual Reads (and Writes on highend SSDs) can go far past this and in which case SATAIII would be an advantage, but everyday usage is going to go unnoticed. I have an Intel 330 240GB SSD and it is pretty darn fast compared to the (2) HDDs i had in a RAID 0. I also tested using Crystal Diskmark against a friends 128GB 330 drive on a new Z77 motherboard. My Sequentual and 512K random Reads were capped by my SATAII, but everything else was actually higher than her drive performance. In the real world you wouldn't see these numbers because it is usually not sequential data and you are not reading a large number of tiny 512K files.

thanks jay2tall just one more quick question, is it worth buying a 256gb ssd for OS and a few games and where can i buy a expansion card for usb 3.0, i am from england so i hope this helps thanks for your info

A 120/128 GB SSD will hold your OS and a handful of games and apps. The 240/256 GB drives are also starting to be a good buy. I picked mine up for $60 USD. It is already 109 GB full and I have Office 2010 premium and a handful of games. Max Payne 3 was 30GB alone. BF3 is also VERY large. So do the math.

As far as USB Cards. I can't really say which is better. Just look on a PC parts site and find one with good reviews. That is what I would do. Buy something that others have had success with, aka, already been the guinea pigs. They are about $20 in the US, not sure there. Just look around.

thanks a lot for the advice.