It seems you are looking for a project to learn with and you would like assistance with:
- selecting parts,
- assembling these parts,
- ensuring the assembled parts operate with stability,
- install the operating system,
- configure the system.
Your request possesses a very wide scope that will make it difficult for anyone to provide a focused reply.
Select Parts
Read through as many of the articles on this website as you can handle. Then visit the forums and read through the thread titles in the categories of your interest. Ask questions where needed. There is a category for each system component. Case/power supply, motherboard, processor, memory, video card, operating system, and more.
NewEgg.com is great for searching for parts. NewEgg customers provide unreliable reviews but you can get a good idea.
There are many decisions to be made. Cheap or expensive case? 80Plus power supply? Motherboard features (DDR3, video on board?), Processor price range (number of cores, overclocking?). Memory speed rating, manufacturer, high bandwidth or low latency? Video card needs and budget. Windows, Linux, BSD, or Apple for an operating system?
Combine your thoughts and hardware selection and post a thread in
General Hardware with a request for others to review your selection.
Then you can ask for hard drive recommendations. Some will recommend Western Digital, others Seagate, and still more for Samsung or Hitachi. Everyone has their own personal preferences and my preferences will not necessarily meet your needs.
When you put the system together, will you accept the default BIOS options or attempt to customize your BIOS settings for your needs? Do your needs include overclocking the processor? Maybe a little? Do not forget to select AHCI as the driver for the hard drives. Ah, but you mentioned the possibility of SSD. I have not kept up with the SSD market but there are articles detailing how the original SSD's provide unreliable bandwidth for random disk accesses. It will definitely help to be familiar with the current market situation for SSD drives. Anand has focused on this technology with some very insightful (IMO) research and articles.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/
Parts Assembly
When I assemble my computer system, I like to take time to explore the limits of my hardware, to see how fast I can push the processor and memory without significant voltage increases. My current system, I tested for a month or two before I performed the final installation. This allowed me to compare the differences between different processor speeds with their related voltages and decide which setting was good for my needs. I then compared different memory settings for:
- high bandwidth with high voltage
- low latency with low voltage.
For my system, I found that low latency settings with low voltage performed only slightly less than the high bandwidth with much higher voltage. However, this required good memory with low timings. The standard value memory can typically only be used at the default settings and value memory often impairs system overclock settings. Personally, I found both G.Skill and Mushkin memory to work very well for me, with low timings of course.
I provided a method to place the User Profile data on a second partition in
this thread. The applications can stay with the system files. It is the user data that is important to separate from the operating system files and place on a separate partition.
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