quick check on a build im recommending to a friend

[Reaper 392]

he has £500 to spend and currently has a good PSU (antec HCG 550W or 650W), a 5870 and an IDE DVD drive and hard drive.

he really doesnt want to spend money on new hard drives right now, so ive recommended a PCI card with two IDE slots on it for ~£10, along with what im going to recommend to him

the PC is mainly for gaming.

i'm not really sure which route to take, so ive shown him both builds. i've tried to make sure he isnt spending too much on a temporary solution to the 'missing' bit of the build

option 1: 120GB SSD, upgrade cooler later
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £167.99
1 x Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive £149.99
1 x MSI Z68A-GD55-G3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £124.99
1 x Cooler Master Elite 430 Windowed Case - Black £39.98
1 x Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9AD3B1K2/4G) £26.99
Total : £523.44 (includes shipping : £11.25).
with the MSI motherboard deal thats going on this should end up about £10 over budget
only bit thats missing is the cooler, which can be upgraded later. 8GB RAM would have been nice too, but most games dont use more than 4GB anyway so i figured this wasnt a major thing
the SSD should come in handy, especially since he will be using an IDE HDD
*edit*
ram should be £23.99 corsair 4GB kit in this one, not the kingston stuff
*/edit*

option 2: SSD upgrade later
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £167.99
1 x MSI Z68A-GD55-G3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £124.99
1 x Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A1600C9) £45.59
1 x Cooler Master Elite 430 Windowed Case - Black £39.98
1 x Gelid Tranquillo CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM2+/AM3/LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366) £25.99
Total : £418.04 (includes shipping : £11.25).

this one comes way under budget, but leaves a lot of money to be put in the SSD pot for later. i dont really want to recommend a 64GB SSD because it will get filled up very quickly

one thing he has told me is that he doesnt want to spend too much on the cooler, just as long as its quiet. he also really likes the coolermaster case and wouldnt want to spend much more on a case

can you see any problems with what ive recommended him?

 

[Reaper 392]

gelid definitely fits in the 430. the gelid was actually one of the coolers i was considering for my elite 342. would the 430 need an extraction fan, or would it just be helpful?

surely with all the folder moving round stuff it will take a long time to move an entire game from the HDD to the SSD. not exactly something he will want to do before he plays each game
mechanichal HDDs read at ~50Mbps iirc, so that would be a minimum of a 5 minute wait while the game moved to the SSD

 

[Reaper 392]

you move them once of course.

i think we're talking cross purposes here. i'm thinking that if he has a selection of games that he currently plays that will more than fill up the spare space on the SSD then he will quite often have to move games around, which could be a pain, especially if he is using an IDE HDD. with just HDD caching and win7 there would only be ~20GB left on the HDD for games, and this could very easily be more than filled by games he is into at the time

my thinking for the fans is, try it out without and if he feels he wants them i'll happily order for him so he doesnt have to pay shipping on them. (something i wouldnt be happy to do with £500 worth of PC parts obviously). i cant see any way he'd lose out by doing this, other than having a slightly warm PC for a few days. whatever happens it cant be worse than his current case for airflow