[Zachery]

Go with 7200 rpm drives, at least. SSD can be done in a few months/years down the line to give your computer new life.

You don't need 6 slots of memory to get 12gb. My last test build I did I had an amd board with 16gb of ram in 4 slots. Intel boards do tripple channel memory (thus you need 6 slots to stay tripple channel) vs amd boards only doing double channel.

I think the AMD 1090T is the best price to preformance (200 bucks for the cpu), but 9/10 times a i7 will winout if other things are near equal.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html