1. A "good" case depends on the user's needs, for some it might be number of drive bays, others might just be build quality, some want the best designed airflow in mind, and some just want to know it's exotic and rare (and expensive). There are lots of good cases out there, I personally suggest people pick out a case that they like the styling of and that fits in the budget as cooling for the most part won't matter for most builds.
Yes some cases are better at cooling or noise dampening than others, but if a system only runs 1-2 120mm case fans, chances are they'll perform roughly the same unless the components are very high end and demand strong cooling set-ups.
2. Yes things are always getting stronger/newer, however games don't quite work that way. Of the top 50 games on the market, they probably are all built off roughly 5-10 big game engines and then just customized from there with their own coding. Some offer superior performance/realism at the cost of being very taxing on systems (like CryEngine3) and some just offer fairly good performance that works on almost any decent modern system (UT3 engine, Source engine). But one thing most of these games and engines share in common is that they do not scale beyond 4 threads.
There are a few exceptions to this, but for the most part games are still written primarily for dual core systems with a few more taxing titles designed for 4 cores/threads. While they could pretty readily start coding games that require/can scale off 8+ threads, they would alienate most of their user-base because they made a game that's just too demanding for all but 1% of people to play.
An i5 3570K is for all intents and purposes the same basic chip as an i7 3770K, the difference (aside from clocks) is that i7 processors offer HyperThreading, which effectively makes each core on the CPU act as 2 within the operating system. This is great for productivity software, such as video editing, high end photo editing, lots of engineering software. For gaming though, it's basically useless as the only title that is CPU bottlenecked by a 3570K is probably BF3, and that even bottlenecks on i7 processors.
3. An SSD is a special type of hard drive, standard hard drives are mechanical in that there's a spindle with discs basically that a laser writes and reads data from magnetically. SSDs, or Solid State Drives, are called such because they have no moving parts which introduces a number of benefits with how they're designed. Firstly they are blazingly fast, they're not limited by how fast a spindle can spin and basically instantaneous to respond to data requests. They can write and read many, many times faster than mechanical drives while making no noise or vibrations and consuming far less energy.
There are downsides to SSD's though, due to how they're designed currently they do have finite life cycles of a few thousand full writes, most average around 5,000 I believe. But don't let this get you down, under normal household usage that should last well over a decade if your SSD is 128GB or more. Mechanical drives fail too however they can theoretically go on forever, even if real world conditions don't really let that happen. They are also very expensive for the storage space they offer, for instance my Crucial M4 128GB cost me around $108 with tax, for that much I could have probably nabbed a 2 TB standard mechanical drive. But I love my M4 and wouldn't trade it for anything at this point.
Thanks!
Facebook
Twitter