Some things that are important to consider, and which I think are a more valuable contribution to your ability to decide which would be best for you than just telling you what would be best for you.
Also, a really
good gaming PC doesn't have to be as expensive as you might fear, if you buy cleverly. That means don't go for individually overkill products which
will be bottlenecked by at least one other component anyway, and look for good prices. Buying used hardware is no shame either.
RAM
Lots of RAM will only be useful if you plan to have lots of RAM hungry applications open at once, or do heavy editing work. I don't think either is the case, so you'll have
much more than enough RAM if you go with 6 GB. Even that is overkill for I would guess about 98% of the games available, and the rest is probably games you don't play. Perhaps some horribly coded games too, so if you're worried about that you might go for 8. Anything above that would be stupid though. Personally I would stick with 4.
If you want to increase performance of your RAM, making sure to use double/triple/quadruple channel it is a very efficient way of doing so. This only really works with identical RAM sticks though. And those with the fancy cooling plates are only ever useful if you plan to do heavy OC. You probably won't.
SSD
This is a great way of making stuff load faster, but be advised that it only does just that. They do not increase FPS. If you want to make sure your system and some critical programs that normally take very long to load are available faster, this is a relatively good investment, otherwise it is not at all worthwhile. The games you have probably don't take long enough for this to be a worthwhile investment, $/GB wise.
Also, never defragment them. It doesn't make sense due to their construction, and might damage them, again due to how they work.
Also, some games might stutter from having to reaccess the drive to load additional data while the game is running, but that's along the lines of Crysis or GTA 4. Consider if you will play games like these and if you mind ocassional stuttering.
They have no mechanical parts, thus are as silent as silence can get, and they are also more energy efficient (
I'm not sure if this is true for their production though, so if you'd consider this out of ecological concern you should check on that too, if you can).
HDD
These have a great $/GB rate, but you might want to look out for the HDD's speed. While e.g. 5600 RPM might be good enough for a storage drive (
for music or pics or whatever), 7200 is better for games and other applications, and the cost increase won't be nearly as dramatic as HDD -> SSD. Apparently there are also methodss to increase de facto speed of slow RPM drives called
short stroking and
wide stroking, but I've known about those only for a few seconds now and can't really say anything about whether it might be useful for you.
Considering they are a potentially significant noise source, you might want to buy damping devices, but that might be something to buy later if you want to see if they are reasonably quiet without any damping.
CPU: I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but anything beyond 4 core is a definite wate of money as far as gaming is concerned, and not only because some programmers really do a horrible job of keeping with the market and at most optimise their games for dual core acitivity even though they could take advantage of additonal CPU cores. You're unlikely to have to do much with these though.
GPU: A high-end card will probably be a rather poor investition, and anything beyond 1Gb of VRAM doesn't make sense without utilising
high resolutions, for which you need a big monitor. If you consider an upgrade to HD-resolution, it might be worthwhile though. However consider that this will result in a much steeper price, particularly if you have to buy a new monitor. I would in fact go so far as to suggest not going beyond upper mid range under any circumstances. Those beasts above are not made for games like yours, and won't be for a few years. It's thrown out money, as simple as that.
Adding to that
Monitors: 19 inches is already a pleasing diameter, but for the full immersion you mgith want to get 21 or more inches. But you should also consider color balance and response time. Higher response time results in a blurred screen during movements. Less than 16ms is usually a safe bet. Professional technical reviews are probably the best reference, as they always are.
Sound: Hardware sound processing isn't supported anymore since Vista, so if you want to use stuff like EAX, you're gonna have to consider that it only works with ALchemy, which is sometimes buggy, or might not at all support game x. Also, in fancy sound cards most of the price is in the features. Even lowcosting sound cards will have top-notch technical specifications, consider the Xonar budget options for example.
Consider this graph. The human hearing range is
in best case scenarios 20 to 20,000 hz, generally steeply declinging after 15,000, and a change of about 1 dB is considered audible, so you can see that even a "lowly" Xonar DX will already process the sounds quite faithfully.
As for noise, you really shouldn't worry about this in sound cards, they're mostly so good at avoiding this that marketing usually revolves around values that are
way beyond audibility.
Also, I would personally advise you to get a
high-quality stereo headphone for the best listening experience, both for games and music. Boxes are not worth it, well-performing 5.1 sets would usually cost at least as much as you want to pay for the complete system, and if you don't have a room with favourable acoustic conditions that might mess with the quality a lot.
If spatiality is a great concern for you, that can be reconstructed reasonably convicingly (
and from what I hear much more so than with 5.1 headset nonsense) with CMSS-3D or Dolby Headphone, and positioning works de facto incredibly fine with well-working headphones. For example in SS3 Co-Op matches, when one of those witches announces their arrival at a particular place by a crackling sound, I'm usually the first to accurately locate it and open fire, often with differences of more than 1 second to the next fastest, mostly more, and I am using the AKG K 601. From the looks of it these would be too costly for a PC set-up of 1 grand though, you'd have to cut a lot of corners to accomodate them, so you should look out for others.
Don't go to Head-Fi for reference though, that place is one dreadful cumfest of audiophile voodoo outside of the "Sound Science" sub forum. HeadRoom has a lot of reviews, but I don't know about their quality, they will probably vary a lot depending on the reviewer. Also they might have fallen to the deathtrap of sponsoring, in which case immediate retreat is advisable.
You should generally be cautious with reviews that read like a wine review anyway - they're probably utter nonsense and unapplicable to your situation anyway. Objective measurements are best as you can from them abstract to your situation the best (
is that okay English? Seems deadfully clumsy to me.).
And if you're wondering about the strange frequency response graphs of headphones, they generally avhe to account for the lack of room sound and bone conduction. This is also why one size never
quite fits all, deplorably.
Also, make sure it has a low impedance. High impedance (
like about >100 Ohm) generally makes the headphones harder to drive - decreasing max volume level and also messing with the bass quality in some cases. If you do want phones and get ones above 100 Ohm, you should make sure to get an audio card with an integrated headphone amplifier, or separate dedicated headphone amplifier. Both will cause avoidable costs.
Mainboard: This, as much as CPUs, is not really my area of expertise. I can only confidentally say that you should not go for boards marketed as OC material unless you really want to OC or have carefully analysed technical reviews of the respective product, they might well have a worse baseline performance than normal mainboards.
PSU: Loads of watts are useless, particularly if you don't want to OC like a madman. 500-600 watts are quite surely enough for you, you should look for a high efficiency though. "80plus" should be considered bare minimum.
General stuff: Liquid cooling is
utter nonsense, quite simply put. If you're not doing hardcore OC work you'll never find yourself in a position where it's a worthwhile option
at all, and it's extra maintenance.
As for cases, a good one is important but luckily unexpensive to have. It doesn't need to be the ultra stylish super modern modular design, it's well enough if you get something where you can't cut your fingers and their moms open during assembly. The ability to add bigger coolers -having them shipped with the case is a definite plus- is a significant plus since those can run slower and therefore much quieter than smaller coolers. Also, if you think you might move it around a lot weight might be a concern.
Something that I have found while looking for an example of a good realtively affordable case and personally found attractive was the
Fractal Design Define R2. You might look it up and see if it appeals to you.
Also, it would be very wise to include a good chair in this, if you don't have one already. This primarily means adjustability of height and tilt, comfortable and durable seating and overall safety. There are more things to a really good chair, but this means an increased price too.
Quote from Hannah's Lover;849034:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium + Office Starter 2010 (Includes basic versions of Word and Excel) - 64-Bit )
OS is pretty much the best choice for you, but I wouldn't buy Microsoft Office. Open Office works just as well, and is completely free.