Profile of WalkinTarget

The i7 adds 4 virtual threads (not cores) to the i5, what is known as hyper-threading. They rarely help most games to get better framerates, but at some point newer games can and will offload work to them, things like PhysX or 3D audio processing. To pay additional $$ for the i7 over the i5 is not really justified in your case. That $ would be much better served investing in a faster GPU such as a 280X.

Now, on to the iRST SSD. I have a Z68 board that has a 20GB mSATA slot. It is used to cache the frequently used apps or games that I play, not used as a boot drive at all. What it does is caches the files accessed by the 1TB HDD, so that the first time you open CoH2, it must load from the HDD - which is going to be sloooow. The NEXT time you open CoH2, it will be able to pull most of the files needed from the iRST SSD, and that will make it load significantly faster than from the HDD - we are talking 3x,4x faster here. It will not be as fast as a traditional SSD, but it will be close, and since it is not a boot drive, it won't fill up like a smaller 120 or 240GB SSD will with games now requiring up to 30-40GB just to install.

Safe bet is to go with the i5, add the 32GB SSD and save for the 280x. CoH 2 is very unforgiving when it comes to a slower video card. Anything less than a 7970 is just not playing it like it is meant to be played.

Turtle Beach X42 headset here. I got tired of sharing the PC with my 10 yo daughter who would wrap the extra long cable from my old Plantronics 370s around the center channel speaker.

Going wireless with the X42s meant no more cable unwrapping for me !!

Registered here just to thank OP for this. I managed to snag the Fortifications doctrine commander after 2 hours, and while I understand Sega wants to milk the DLC for everything they can, I feel it at least gives one a chance to get a rare skin or commander every now and then.