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[daishi5]

I just built a new machine, and I can give some input.  SSD makes DF launch faster, but it costs so much you would be very hard pressed to squeeze it into your budget.  My graphics card died, and I had to RMA it, DF does not run well without a graphics card. 

This is not my thread, but I used this as a base starting point for my build.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2192841

The top build is the latest, for your budget, cut the SSD, and cut the graphics card down to a 5850, and your almost at $700.  Past those two cuts, it gets a lot harder to shave off any cash.  You might be able to save some money with a smaller hard drive.  Cutting out the aftermarket cooler also saves some money, but the aftermarket cooler really does help if you want to OC your chip.  (totally worth it).

If you can save up some money, go ahead and buy an SSD later, the upgrade is awesome, but it is such a huge portion of your budget you would need to make major cuts in other places to get in under $700.

If this is your first time building a computer, go slow and take your time to get things right, also be very careful with the motherboard because the pins for the processor are very small and delicate.

[helf]

I'd say go with a smaller ssd as your boot drive and use standard hdds for storage. I currently have an Intel xtreme series 40gb in my laptop for boot and a 120gb spindle drive for storage.

The other option id actually highly recommend, specially for a laptop, is one of the momentus xt hybrid drives. They actually work extremely well and their price isn't very bad. Its a great speed vs storage vs cost balance.

Im getting the newer 750gb hybrid for my laptop soon. The drives firmware works on the premise of moving the most often used LBA blocks to the 4/8gb ssd (size depends on model) cache to improve speeds. after a few reboots and a couple days of normal usage your app launching and boot times will be near full ssd speeds. It's OS agnostic, as well.

[Kamamura]

I did not have good experience with hybrid disks. On paper, it should be great, but it does not work that well. The problem is that Windows 7 has Prefetch that guesses up what are you going to launch (by memorizing your habits), and loads that into memory in advance, so that the OS feels faster and more responsive. Couple of Prefetch misses, and your cache will be full of app data you never used. Try for yourself, however.

[SmileyMan]

the Ars Technica system guides are a good starting point if you want to self-build.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/12/ars-technica-system-guide-december-2011.ars

[Biopass]

The bottom line is that you want an i5 2500 or higher. Don't skimp on your CPU - the $200 price tag is worth it. $800 got me a computer that runs DF at 500+ fps (haven't even overclocked yet), and will run Skyrim at 1080p while still getting a consistent 40+ fps. If I hadn't bought such a powerful graphics card, it would have been $600, and DF wouldn't have been affected.

[kotekzot]

Also remember, that multi-core doesn't really help DF. A 3 Ghz single-core would be better than a 2,7 Ghz dual-core.

That's not strictly true, as most single core cpus will do far less with a cycle than the newer multicore cpus.