Yet Another "Build me a computer"

Thanks for the tip there, I'll take that into consideration. If it is gonna be too much of a hassle, I'll say screw it and just get a better graphics card. And thanks for the cheaper build as well, I think I'll stick with the higher end build though, it seems to be the best route to go.

One question, what is youse guys opinion on a SSD as a boot drive? I've heard it makes things a LOT faster and at only another $100 for one, I am considering in investing in one of them as well.

Oh, and by the way, I've raised my cap to $1000, I figured it would just be easier on myself so I could have some leeway.

Because of the way SSDs are designed, they have a slightly higher failure rate than traditional HDDs, and they also generally can't store as much data either without shoveling out extra wads of cash, but they do make a huge difference in OS boot times, program installations, and general load times with any program installed on the drive. Without an SSD your hard drive is always pretty much going to be the biggest bottleneck on your system, but I personally haven't found load times to be too annoying as long as I'm working with at least 7200 RPM drives. I'm a bit disappointed that there isn't a reasonable alternative to completely replacing traditional HDDs yet, but yeah, if you're willing to spend the extra money, an SSD can be worth it as long as it's just used as the OS boot drive while still using a regular HDD as a secondary for storing the rest of your programs and data on.

I do agree, solid state drives are amazingly fast. However, I actually found it hard to use it without worrying about killing it because I like to do Photoshop work and such. It's really hard when you know it's going to die faster than other regular hard drives.
If you have a spare DVD or so, you can throw Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it and give that a shot - the optimization on that brings performance at least fast enough to almost match the speeds of a solid state drive, but that's only if you really insist on the speed. Other than that, any other operating system should still do fine.

I do agree, solid state drives are amazingly fast. However, I actually found it hard to use it without worrying about killing it because I like to do Photoshop work and such. It's really hard when you know it's going to die faster than other regular hard drives.
If you have a spare DVD or so, you can throw Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it and give that a shot - the optimization on that brings performance at least fast enough to almost match the speeds of a solid state drive, but that's only if you really insist on the speed. Other than that, any other operating system should still do fine.

Actually, I just installed the Consumer Preview two days ago and so far, I like it. It's pretty smooth flowing, though the Metro UI is taking difficulty getting used to. All in all though, it's pretty solid for a beta.

Give Classic Shell a try and you have a start menu once again. Given, it's not Windows 7's start menu, but it's a mix between the 9x/XP start menu with customizable settings, so it's pretty neat.

Yeah I dunno, I personally can't get over the lack of a start menu and the MS Paint-like large plain color icons as a replacement for it. Seriously, I could do a better job in Photoshop. The nice thing about Win8 is that it improves performance slightly again, but it's not enough to win me over from Win7 with a lame interface like that. Win7 still seems better to me overall at least as a desktop OS. I could certainly see Win8 being more useful for tablets and mobile devices.

I'm pretty sure that at some point there will be some modifications made to it to allow customizable styles or something along the lines of XP, Vista, and Windows 7. I'm pretty sure Stardock will have something up their sleeves as well.
Quite honestly, what differences does a 7200 RPM hard drive have compared to others? That's kind one of those things I've never really looked into.

Most standard desktop hard drives are 7200 RPM nowadays. You really only need to be concerned about it when getting a laptop, as manufacturers like to go cheap and throw in 5400 RPM drives a lot. RPM simply refers to the rate at which the hard drive spins (revolutions per minute), so the more RPMs, the faster you'll be able to access data from the drive.

I suppose that makes sense. I really thought that there wasn't too much of a difference between them (I was just looking at a few 4800 RPM drives around here) and realized that alot of the ones used are 7200 RPM to begin with. I really like the idea behind the Solid State Drives, but I really hope there's a way to make their lifespan last because I'd hate to see incredibly expensive drives go down the drain, especially when I'm using a 240 GB Solid State Drive at the moment. It's a Corsair Force 3 drive, so I'm not sure if that says anything.