Desktop advice

[Supergoal]

I've been out of pc gaming for a few years now and lots has changed. So I was hoping for a little advice.
I'm thinking of buying a desktop for some gaming on a reasonable budget.
I found this in my local Japanese pc store.


Corei7 870
4gb ram
64gb Solid state drive
1 tb hdd
GeForce gts 450

This is on as a deal for 124,700 yen. Not including monitor or keyboard.
If you were to convert it into pounds it would seem expensive, but overall, depending on monitor resolution is this a good setup?

In think I could even lower CPU spec to reduce the overal cost a little. Is there a big difference between i7 and i5?

The graphic card I've not heard of but it seems fairly cheap. Would you go with that?

Any help appreciated.

[charlesr]

i5 is pretty fast and will run cooler and quieter than an i7

[abigsmurf]

It's a reasonable slap bang in the middle range PC, a bit overpriced (by around £100 by prebuilt standards) but I understand PCs are expensive in Japan in general. The SSD setup is nice (and fairly unusual) though, will make a big difference in general desktop usage (faster boots, Windows will be snappier in general).

If at all possible, I'd suggest going down to a i5 and seeing if the savings let you upgrade to a gts460. Graphics cards make so much more difference to gaming now than CPU (so long as the CPU isn't slow enough to bottleneck the system).

Otherwise, depending on how much you save, you don't really need an i7 with that graphics card. The i7 will sit there twiddling its thumbs whilst the card works away. The i7 will make a big difference in video editing/encoding and other pure CPU tasks though if that's going to be a main use of the system.

[charlesr]

My i5 converts (with handbrake) 720p to h.264 at around 23fps (so almost realtime) and DVDs rip at 45+fps if that helps you figure out if you need the i7 or not.

[Supergoal]

Thanks guys.

As I thought the i7 while nice is overkill and unnecessary for what I'm intending with it.

The 64gb SSD seems cool and the large standard HDD is nice.

The gts 460 is that much better than the 450?

Edit* You mean the GTX 460?

[abigsmurf]

yeah, Nvidia's naming system is utterly horrible.

460 is a notable step up, about 5-6 fps better than the 450,

[Supergoal]

The gtx 460 seems to come with 768mb of vram compared to the 1gb of vram on the gts 450!.. So confusing.. Yet the gtx is better?

[abigsmurf]

VRAM (or lack of) tends to influence how well the card performs at the top resolutions with FSAA turned on. you may get a slight drop in performance at max resolutions over 1gb cards but otherwise the difference is slight to non-existant.

As the 460 is a more powerful card than the 450 to begin with, it manages to compensate for the performance hit caused by the lack of vram. The 460 outperforms the 450 at every resolution in every game (as far as I can tell)