To be continued as I get more stuff sorted:

Originally planned as: AMD Phenom II X4 965 with a GTX285 on an 780a NForce Board.

Ultimately came out as Intel i7-860 with a HD4890 on a Asus Board with P55 chipset.

4GB DDR3, a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD, Antec 902 case, Enermax 620W PSU.

Lessons learned:

1) Neither HD5870 or GTX285 can be found anywhere currently. HD4890 is the most powerful card you can reliable order, likely until December.

2) AMD Chipsets (790GX/750SB) are throttling the performance of SSDs beyond what is acceptable. NForce Chipsets too. Their SATA controllers can not reliable pull the 200+ MB/s, Intel Chipsets can do that just fine. Ultimately means if you want to fully enjoy the damn expensive SSD you can not run an AMD.

3) Intel is catching up in the Price/Performance game. The new i5 750 and i7 860 are not considerable more expensive than the top AMD, but depending on application can go "Turbo" and outperform the Phenom nicely. The i7-860 regularly beats the i7-920, for 240EUR, and the boards are comparable cheap too.

4) Another reason to ultimately go Intel was that I wanted a chipset driver independent from my GFX driver. Both AMD and Nvidia chipsets run on Catalyst and Forceware drivers, so if you are swapping GFX card to a different brand later on, you might have complications with conflicting driver sets. The Intel driver is "neutral".

5) The SSD Experience: I'll have some concrete loading time comparisons later, for now I can already say that it does NOT make everything load 4x as fast (even though the tested read speed is that much faster over a conventional disk). Even though CPU and RAM are plenty and W7 is already damn fast on it's own, there are seemingly other bottlenecks at boot and when games load files which are not purely HDD related.

OTOH, it sure as hell loads applications fast. Outlook 2003 comes up as quickly as if it had been minimized in the task bar. No kidding. And while copying files to the drive from an external (by design much slower) USB Disk, the drive has plenty performance reserves to keep you working normally, while on a mechanical HD I found that when moving large files, you can not really do anything else meanwhile. The whole thing just feels super-responsive... "task not responding" while too much HDD activity takes place is a thing of the past.

6) Antec simple makes good towers. I now have a CPU 5°C above ambient room temperature at idle, and even if a game momentarily heats up the components, the temperature-dependent fans (CPU and GPU) come down instantly when the game load is reduced. On my old system, even low-graphic games would ultimately heat up the air inside the case to a point where all fans went on full drive, you couldn't avoid "thermal builtup." With the 902 and it's large top fan (as well as front and back fan) you have so much air circulation that cool-down is instantly when load goes down. And even under heavy load, the noisy high RPM CPU and GPU cans can go slower since the low-noise low RPM case fans do most of the job.

7) Win7: By and large awesome, but needs some getting used too, especially the start menu (my biggest hangup right now). To avoid early headache, I disabled UAC, Windows Defender and the Firewall for now (behind a router anyway). Contrary to Vista nothing then bothers you doing your stuff or installing drivers. I will re-enable these security features once I know everything works. What I really like is the Complete PC Backup option which seems destined to replace my Acronis. What I don't like is the fact that contrary to previous rumours, Win7 did not set itself correctly for SSD (Auto-Defrag, Indexing, Superfetch should be disabled but weren't).

Note of interest: ATI's Flat-Panel scaling option right now does not work in W7, at least I have it grayed out and I found a lot of people with the same problem but no solution.

8) Some rough first performance impressions: IMHO, everyone who goes for a SLI Setup or overclocked i7-960 or the likes must be nuts or simple has too much money. This box, at a reasonable 1400EUR (1570 if you include the Ultimate license) runs Armed Assault on "High Settings" with full Aniso and 4xFSAA, 1920x1200, even inside urban areas and fire fights with 100s of soldiers in it. WARFARE mode, which previously crunched my CPU at 17FPS, now goes over 34FPS.
Older games can't even compete - Thirdwire's First Eagles now gives me a constant maximum 60FPS at highest settings with 20 AI aircraft all around me. Mount & Blade also maxes out at my screen refresh rate even in a castle siege. Next in trial will be Stalker CS: in DX10.1, but I expect to run it at highest settings on the same resolution.

9) 620W is plenty for a single-card system, even if everyone seems hell-bent on rather selling low-quality 750W or higher PSUs.

10) So far, with my Office Apps and the first three games, Zero Problems with 64bit.

I'll keep adding games and apps the next days, and report back some measured loading times to give an idea of what the SSD can do.

You'll start noticing performance issues when you'll start trying more modern games (by modern I mean last years). Especialy the Stalker series you mentioned has huge performance issues in those resolutions, at the highest settings.

The i7-860 is a very good cpu for the money, but the i7-920 has the advantage of unlocked multipliers, which of course is a plus only if you would bother overclocking it. If not, yeah, 860 is a much more logical purchase.

W7 not recognizing an SSD and auto-adjusting its settings sounds retarded, yes.

I beg to differ for now... Stalker:CS already ran nice (in full dynamic lighting) on my 9600GT with 512MB. I might not be able to pull out all the stops in DX10.1, but I bet DX9 Enhanced will run very well with all details maxed - and the only thing you lose from DX10 is wet surfaces and volumetric smoke.

We'll know in a few hours

I never overclock, I wanted a package that is stable and simple to maintain. More to the point, I don't believe there's gonna be a game in the next two years that will max out this CPU.

I think Win7 bases it's SSD optimizations also on a minimum average transfer rate, somewhere above 70MB/s. I can't see why it shouldn't have kicked in.

The article here talks about how it was meant to be:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

I can only say that this is not the behaviour I saw, despite my SSD making a 7.3 in Win Performance Rating which is rather good according to that article.

I am interested since I ordered a 128 GB SSD on my new system.

If you were to do it again, would you still have gone with the SSD ?

Yes - given the initial first impressions, yes, although the difference is not as huge as I expected in actual load times, it makes up for the price by the overall smoothness and responsibility.

And in addition I get no noise and no heat (an average HD runs at 40°C easily, so I'm sure the cool SSD is partly responsible for the great low temperatures I'm getting).

If the controller doesn't go south - which can happen on any drive, but is unlikely with an Indilinx or Samsung - then there's also little to no risk of lost data, since the wost that can happen is running out of write cycles on the MLC Flash, which gives you a read-only storage.

Of course, for me it's easy since I'm not a digital pack rat. I had a 250GB drive in my previous system, but only ever used 80B (also for reasons of fast full system backup). If you are into collecting tons of movies, MP3s and other stuff, or if you want to install 20 of the latest games each with a 15GB footprint, you want a secondary drive for these and then the benefits IMHO are reduced.

But for me, I can run everything from a single drive, and it's all faster and smoother.

Nice summary. Keep it coming

Okay, some data for the SSD. Obviously the comparison is not entirely valid, since I'm comparing my previous system (5000+ AMD, 9600GT), with XP SP2, against this new system with Win7, these factors alone are playing a role.

But, for what it's worth, here are the old and new numbers in seconds:

Boot to Desktop visible: 58/30
Boot to open Google Chrome: 81/34
Opening Photoshop: 15/4
Loading a mission in First Eagles: 17/10
Loading Chenarus in the Arma2 Editor: 37/12

It's interesting that there's no clear ratio between these numbers (it's not a set factor X faster) but it's a very favorable improvement all across the board. Boot times suffer a bit (not factored in the test) since the Asus board or Antec case (not sure what's the culprit here) do a fan test first before actually powering up the Bios and display. I counted boot time as time from actual signal to screen.

Like I said, I think the biggest "feelable" improvement is with Outlook 2003. Since in W7 you now "pin" programs to the task bar instead of a quick launch icon, it really feels as if OL2003 has been minimized down there waiting for me. On the old system I always got to see the splash screen for a while before the program actually responded to input.

Just put TrackIR on, and it's running flawless - no W7 problems.

Nice real-world indicator of SSD-based performance. Thanks for breaking out the stopwatch, RSC.

Okay, some more numbers.

Stalker:CS (after much troubles, which are described in the separate thread) runs at about 30 to 40 avg. using DX10.1, 1920x1200, 2xFSAA, settings max. or one notch down from max.

I haven't yet had a scene with the sun rays in it (all my savegames are at night right now) so I have to check shadow performance once the sun comes up, but on the old system it did not change much the average framerate.

Really not bad for a sub-200 USD card given that this is the most demanding game on my system right now.

DX10 drives the load times up, but DX9 tests also show basically instant (5 seconds) level loading (both the faster CPU and SSD play a part here) compared to the about 15 seconds on the old system.

Notable is that streaming new landscape (when the little floppy-icon comes up as you walk around) still can cause framerate drops, even with the SSD. I thought this would be gone.

ATI definitely has some stuff left to fix for W7x64 since Vsync doesn't work in that game, so that's Flat Panel Scaling and Vsync both problematic in the drivers (9.10).

So my lesson from yesterday evening is that the 4890 is an acceptable fast card, the only one you can get easily right now, but I'd still rather have had the GTX285 with less driver worries and more convenience setting up game profiles.
Second lesson is that TIR4Pro has zero issues in W7x64 and runs great, in fact the software is much more stable than on my old system.

Tonight I plan to put Fallout3 on and some productive apps. I hope for no surprises and expect F3 to run like crap trough a goose.

Nice reading, thanks. Will consider a few of your points for my new system. By the way what exactly is a Solid State Drive?