Seeking advices for budget gaming rig building

[bullbman]

Thank your for your attention. I am looking for a decent gaming pc with a very limited budget of $500~$800. I attempted to understand some basics about customising pc and had a few questions.

I have always been an intel cpu user and quite satisfied by their performance for years. Although the AMD chips seem to be more cost-effective in its reputation, I feel being more into stability. So I want to know if it is worthy spending a great part of the budget buying a i5 (or mb i7) processor. For the disk I am wondering if I can have a tiny SSD (for OS) with an extra HDD (for storage) or just a HDD would be more suitable since the limit of $ (P.S. and how about stripped 2 HDDs? Will that be a big difference? ). And also, as a loyal user of NV graphic cards, I feel like attach with them instead of Ati cards.

These are all my difficulties so far. Any kind of help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much again.

[David (PassMark)]

If you want to keep it closer to the $500 mark then have a look at a Pentium G860, GeForce GTX 560 & 4GB of RAM. I don't think you are also going to get 2 reasonable hard drives without going above $500. Don't go under 80GB for the SSD, the 60GB drives are just too small IMHO.

If you wanted to spend a bit more then maybe look at the Intel Core i5-3570.

You can also built a cheap system around the AMD FX-8150.

[bullbman]

Thank you very much Davie. From your kind advice I suppose Intel would still be the choice for me. Could you please also tell a bit about the comparison between having 2 stripped HHD or 1SSD+1HHD? Which one if supposed to be faster and what are their advantages and disadvantages compare to one another? Thanks a lot.

[David (PassMark)]

Can say which one would be the fast drive setup without referring to particular models of hard drives.

I would pick the SSD + HDD rather than use RAID.

The SSD has a random seek time about 100x higher than a traditional HDD (regardless of stripping).

Striping also doubles the risk of data loss if a drive fails, you can't monitor the SMART data from the drives and you'll also have device driver issues for low level tasks (like the initial install of Windows).