New hardware needed

[LP]

GPU: This one has been moving at one heck of a pace lately. I have an HD5750 from XFX which is sitting at clock speed just higher than a stock HD5770 which is actually surprisingly capable of a GPU in my opinion since I have no problem playing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, MAss effect 1,2 and 3 all on the highest settings at vsync (which for me is 1280x1024 at 60fps). Although for around £50-65 gets you an XFX HD6670 with 1GB of GDDR5. NOT DDR3. GDDR5. I like XFX for my cards, my friends likes Asus... We both had no issues. Although if driver support is a must consider an nVidia alternative. My board recommendation has no issues with SLI so....

Drivers for AMD GPUs have issues almost on all platforms, so for stability I'd suggest Nvidia. If you pick AMD video cards, go for raw power, in which case get 6770 or higher. Mine Asus HD 6780 is pretty good, but fully loaded it runs at 90+ C, and 70 C if you use more than 1 monitor on it. If you don't need raw power, avoid AMD video cards for now.

P.S. Radeon HD 6670 does run Stalker - Shadows of Chernobyl smooth, but it quickly gets overwhelmed if you use 1920 × 1080 resolution, enable multisampling, or try Stalker - Call of Pripyat on med to high settings, for instance.

Storage: In my experience: SSD boot drivers are here and they are the future.

My experience says otherwise. I'd suggest sticking away from SSDs for now, unless you enjoy doing repair and reinstall every couple of months while losing all your data in the process. Unless, of course, you barely use your machine, in which case SSD will not make much difference anyway. Both Sandforce and non-sandforce SSDs have issues at one point or another; sure, not all of the fail within certain time, but it's like playing roulette. In our office, a sandforce-based SSDs have been replaced twice now (and they had latest firmware) and Crucial SSD has recently locked up and no way to extract the data from it. Sure, all of them received 7.9 score in Windows, but fewer seconds faster boot time was quickly overwhelmed by 2-3 days of repairs, headaches, calls to support center and backup recovery each time SSD dies. You can google for: "Intel SSD lockup", "Crucial SSD lockup", "Sandforce problem", "Samsung SSD lockup" and so on.

1.) SSD: do you mind loading/boot times. An SSD boot drive makes things FEEL a LOT - and I mean a geological AGE FASTER - but is costly...
2.) HDD: I know this is an odd one HOWEVER if on windows, by the time you fill 1TB of space your OS is going to slow down. Quite a lot. If you dual boot or are a linux user you can pretty safely ignore this point (unless you apt-get everything on your HDD in which case... nuff said )

Avoid large HDDs, they are usually slower or faster to age. Stick with 500 Gb, if possible. If you properly defragment your hard-drive, at least on Windows, the boot time difference between SSD and HDD is minimal. For instance, on my rig, Core i7 2600K with 2133 Ghz Patriot RAM 16 Gb, the majority of boot time is eaten by BIOS POST, not the actual OS startup (and no, I no longer use SSD).

Also, I remember reading an article somewhere that stated that hard drives available in stores are typically those that failed quality checks (the ones that passed QC are sold to companies at higher prices). In my own case, I've never seen any of my Fujitsu HDDs fail, neither WD HDDs, but I have experienced physical wear on Seagate HDDs (manifests itself as higher noise and lower performance).

P.S. I would not recommend overclocking, unless you want to kill your hardware earlier; overclocking is only possible if you have highest-end CPU and motherboard (OEM tested and certified to survive extreme usage conditions) along with very efficient cooling solution and years of experience doing it. Sure, it is a fun thing to do, but you get only a marginal performance boost since there are many bottlenecks in the system that are not affected by raw CPU speed.

P.S.2. As an example to above, AMD FX-8150 watercooled and not overclocked runs at 50C at 4.2 Ghz (Turbo boost) on full load, while on stock cooler it runs at over 70C, which is higher than 62C maximum OEM suggested temperature. No matter how hard I tried, my both Core i7 rigs running at full load and 3.8 Ghz (Turbo boost) slowly heat up to 70C while on expensive pure-copper air solutions and thermal paste. I can't imagine how can you cool this thing when overclocked without using anything but liquid nitrogen.