Unless you are going for a touch screen/something like it, DO NOT go for Windows 8. Rather go for windows 7 (pirated/original idc). Though your arguments abt SSD are good, but a 7200 rpm high capacity HDD should cost abt the smae if not less. The speed penalty wont be much and so far there's not much use for SSD ryt now, perhaps it will in future...However if you are planning to go for SSD, i wont say anything against it. SInce you are starting out with plenty of RAM, I recommend going for Mobo with good onboard graphics cards, they would handle a lot of games without the external cards. As for processor, I dont recommend going for i3 and then upgrading to i7....as pointed out earlier, i5 is good enough, but I would recommend you to consider AMD processors as well (perhaps some FX series processor) I had seen AMD FX8350 8-core processor to cost around $180-190 - it is a high end gaming processor, with better benchmarks than some i7 CPUs as well check 'em out here http://cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html idk much abt the cooling systems, so i cant such anything abt them. PS: I dont know how it would be taken here, but perhaps you could save a couple of hundred bucks by reusing the previous OS, or not going for an original OS, if you know what i mean .....even linux is a good option