This is really useful for me, I'm moving away next week and will need to buy a computer too. I was considering a laptop for portability but now I'm thinking I might go with a desktop after all if only for the cost to performance ratio.

How important is clock speed? I mean, I know it's important, but I can see a fairly big price difference from some 3.0GHz CPUs to a 3.4GHz, and I don't know if it's worth it or not.

That depends. I don't think you'll have a CPU bottleneck with a i5 3GHz Quad Core for a while but a 3.4GHz will be more future proof, it will also help more where cores don't matter too much like old games but then the 3GHz will be good enough anyway.

It comes down to how you value the difference and that you'll have to calculate yourself.

GTX 260.

Think I have decided on a GTX 770 with 4GB of VRAM and the Intel i7 4770. I know the i5 is pretty much the game for gaming but the small price difference matters very little to me.

Now to bookmark some mobos.

That's what I'm running at the moment :)

My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z87-HD3.

I'm looking at the Asus ROG Hero. Came up a LOT in google seraches for a good i7 4770 mobo. G-skill RAM seems to be the best bet.

I should clarify it was the z87 chipset I meant to recommend, NOT z68. Took a quick look at the Asus ROG Hero and it seems to be a beast of a motherboard, likely overkill for your system (no multi-GPUs, no overclocking etc..) but if you want something stable those high-end mobos are actually worth buying.

My PC boots very quickly because I've got an ASRock motherboard with InstantBoot software. I don't know how quickly it actually boots, but so quickly that it's up and running well before I've returned from the bathroom ten feet away with my toothbrush, or so fast that I don't mind getting up at night to check my email. I'm certain that it's nowhere near as fast as an SSD (and that OS-related tasks aren't performed as fast), but that's one way of saving considerable amounts of money.

Mind you, I have never had an SSD, so what the fuck do I know. I might well jump in the bandwagon and start banging on about them the moment I buy one myself.

I like that it expands to 32GB of RAM for some reason, even though I will never use that haha. I would also like to keep the rest of the computer the same but upgrade my GPU in 2-3 years.

Is there a dramatically cheaper mobo you would suggest? They all seem to be around that price.

Actually no, a z87 motherboard in the $100-150 pricerange possibly but then you would have to read up specifically of what it has that you might need or find some reviews. I've been eyeing to upgrade my system as well and the Asus z87 Gryphon caught my eye but it looks like the ROG isn't that far off so you might as well go with that.

Depends on your needs. have a look at Asrock's Z87 Pro 4 . that would be the cheapest reasonnable MB imho, around 115$ . But if you need more features, you'll have to look in the 140-160$ price range : Asus Gryphon, Maximus Hero , MSI's GD45 gaming and Asrock's Extreme 4

If you use Windows 8 and the default fast boot (which is basically a partial hibernate mode), it will also load Windows 8 in mere seconds, also with old HDDs.

I am not always sure if the people who say their Windows boots up in a few seconds with SSD are mostly referring to Windows 8 fast boot feature, which explains also the fast boot.

I have disabled the fast boot in Win8, though. If I wanted to be able to boot my PC as fast as possible, I guess I would be mostly using the sleep mode.

Thanks, I'll look into those.

Even in Windows 7 I timed my BIOS to working desktop time at about 35 seconds. It's not like I am desperate to shorten that, especially since I rarely ever turn my PC off in the first place.