(20/10/2010 02:17 AM)roberth Wrote:  The ATi cards always suffer from dodgy drivers for the first 6 months - 1 year in my experience, and the 5770 was no exception, as i returned it to get the 460

The 5770 is a pretty popular card, and it's been out for about a year now, so I do find it a bit hard to believe you having much driver issues... (what was the issue with yours?)
Though I do probably prefer nVidia drivers over ATI's.

If you're not going to get an SSD, I'd just go for a single 1TB or 1.5TB 7200rpm drive for everything and not bother with a system drive.

If waiting is an option, I'd probably consider that too.

• CPU: Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer are set to release in 2011
  
• GPU: AMD just released its Radeon 6xxx series cards, which currently have the new tech premium, but should affect GPU prices in some way soon enough.  Maybe AMD's Llano APU may have some effect on this too, though probably only at a low end market
  
• HDD: WD just released a 2.5TB and 3TB drive; although likely to remain a premium product, it may affect HDD (and possibly SSD) prices overall, especially when the competition catch up.  This may also start to signal the switch to UEFI motherboards (as the current BIOS system can only boot off MBR partitions, which are limited to 2TB).
  
• Motherboard: as stated, UEFI motherboards are set to come out in 2011, but perhaps more importantly, Intel SB uses an incompatible socket to current Intel mobos.  Not sure about AMD's compatibility for Bulldozer.  Also, hopefully USB3 and SATA3 are more prolific by then.
  

So some interesting developments, which a build in 2011 may be able to take advantage of.
I think SSDs are likely going to remain a premium product for some time, but on the other hand, there's more competition in the SSD market than for most other PC components, so this may not be the case.

(This post was last modified: 20/10/2010 02:50 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)