Very good advice. An inadequate PSU will make everything else run badly.

I wouldn't consider less than 500W for a new gaming rig, though. The reason is that modern motherboards and graphics cards need high current at +12V, and there just aren't any less-than-500W units that can supply the 34 amps (more if you're going to overclock, and a lot more if you intend to run SLI or Crossfire) or so that you need.

Except for power supplies with a single 12V rail (chiefly Corsair), look closely at the combined 12V power. Multi-rail supplies won't deliver full power on all the rails at once; they'll deliver some lesser combined power. You may see something like "+12V1 22A, +12V2 18A, combined +12V power not to exceed 408W". Gobbledygook like this means "you can draw 22A from the first rail, or 18A from the second rail, but not both at the same time. You can draw only 408W [which is 34A] total from the two rails at the same time."

The two leading suppliers, Antec and Corsair, have a confusing alphabet soup of model numbers. I'll try to decipher some of them.

Corsair uses two-letter codes, like TX or GS.
HX and TX models are their top of the line. HX models have modular cabling; TX models don't. GS is a new model. It's the same as TX. All of these are excellent.

VX and CX are Corsair's low-end models. Avoid them. VX are the same as the old Antec Earthwatts. CX are even cheaper units that aren't even properly spec'd at operating temperature.

Antec uses even more confusing names, including very different power supplies sold in the same model line. Signature, Truepower, and Neo are their best lines. You'll see funny variations on that like Truepower Quattro, Neo Eco, etc. They're mostly Seasonic-made and the same as Seasonic's better models. They tend to be better-priced than comparable Corsair-branded or Seasonic-branded power supplies.

Earthwatts is Antec's mid-range line. There are two very different Earthwatts lines. Models ending in "D" are made by Delta. These are good value, better than Corsair's VX or CX lines. Confusingly, the Earthwatts 650 is also a Delta-made model. Other Earthwatts, without the "D", are older, cheaper Seasonic units.

Basiq is Antec's low-end line. These are cheaply made power supplies from a hodgepodge of manufacturers, some of which are not very good. As with the low-end Corsairs, avoid them.

Chassis: CM ELITE 430 Black
Power supply: CORSAIR PSU 600W 12CM ATX12V2.2 80+
Processor: AMD PHENOM II X6 1055T
Motherboard: ASUS AM3 AMD880G VGA DDR3 SATA6 USB3
Memory: Valueram/4GB 1333MHz DDR3 CL9 DIMM KIT
Display adapter: ASUS HD5670 PCIE 1GB GDDR5 DVI/HDMI
OEM/Win Home Prem 7 32-bit

Ok, what about these components?

Assuming that they aren't doing something massively boneheaded, I would assume that a good machine now would handle it. The main factor being whether or not they're dumb enough to change engines. If they're with the same engine then I'd be optimistic about it.

But, none shall know the specs until its arrival.

Multicore processors didn't exist, at least not outside of research facilities, but multicore processors definitely did.

When it comes to updates and new hardware it depends a great deal how the engineers design it. SATA for instance is very similar to PATA to the point where it didn't require any specialty drivers, unless you wanted full performance. And future revisions of the USB standards should be backwards compatible to the extent that drivers are available for the new chips. But that would only affect newer versions. USB 1.x support was perfectly functional even without drivers for USB2 and I'd wager that will continue to be true into the future.

Get a 64-bit OS. Other than that I think it's pretty decent.

Bad CPU choice, unless you intend to encode x264, render with POVRay, etc..

A Core i3 would be superior to a Phenom II X6 for practically any games. The Phenom II X6 has extra cores, but they aren't each any faster than what Intel had out nearly five years ago. It provides no additional value to most users, over 3-4 cores.

Here is a nice review, with a Phenom II X4, and here is one which has X6 CPUs slightly faster than the 1055. Compared to the last generation i3 CPUs, they provided good value, up to the X4. But, the X6 would not get you better performance, and the new i3 CPUs (the four digit ones) range from about as fast for the same money, to significantly faster. Since this is reflected in prices, up to X4 AMDs can still be decent values.

If a socket 1155 i3 is too much, get something like a Phenom II X4, or Athlon II X4, of the highest affordable clock speed. Prices in Finland obviously make the difference, but if new Intel's aren't too much, an i3 2100 or 2120 should be good values, with Athlon II X4 and Phenom II X4 as backups. In general, a Phenom II will give 5-10% more performance in games, over an Athlon II.

The HD 5760 could struggle at 1080P or over, depending on game, but your budget really make the difference, as to whether a faster card is worth getting. For most of GOG's catalog, it will be overkill at any resolution.

Also, about the OS. With a 32-bit OS, you are limited to a total of 4GB RAM. Devices which use the address space for reading and writing take up a chunk of it. So, right off the bat, your max will go down by 300-700MB. Then, you may have to sacrifice up to your video card's RAM size. Ouch. 64-bit frees you of this problem, but binaries which rely on legacy instructions and memory modes will not run. This can include old software installers, and some older games. The games most frustrating are those in the mid 90s, during the transition between MS-DOS (up to WinME) and Windows NT (XP being the first home version), where you end up with games that won't run in DOSBox, but crash running directly in 64-bit mode in Windows. Games that only have problems with their installers can often be installed in XP Mode, or on another computer with a 32-bit OS, and then copied over.

On the whole, 64-bit is better, since these games are somewhat rare, and you get so much more available memory with 64-bit.

Would someone explain why you would want an i5 over an i7? I have an i7 in my laptop and I had an i7 in my desktop and performance was amazing, and the desktop chip was pretty affordable, even when it was still recent.

Have I missed something in the time since I built a desktop?

EDIT: I'm also going to say this now: I hate AMD video cards. They make good cards but they can't code drivers for them. After I did a clean format of my PC, every single game crashed within minutes. The driver updates would blue screen my system. I've found more incompatibility problems with Radeons than I ever had with my nvidia-based systems. The best Radeon I ever owned was a Radeon 9500 I bought years ago. Ever since the 9800 XT, I've had nothing but problems but like an idiot kept trying them out, hoping they fixed it. I still have some games that have weird artifacts or just won't run at all. Hell, I can't even run Minecraft thanks to Java and my drivers hating each other.

After this laptop, no more. Strictly Nvidia from now on.

run a graphics card test artifacts sounds more like it's over heating and you have a dodgy card

No, it's the card. I've found enough people with the same problems who have confirmed it's due to incompatibility with some games. For instance, Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth and the raindrops being triangles. My 9800XT used to render random red dots in games, no matter what drivers you used.

Don't get me wrong, I've had bad experiences with Nvidia cards, usually performance based from a driver update, but nothing that ever caused me as many headaches.

An i7 offers extremely little additional performance, yet costs quite a bit more, at this time.

i5-2500 v. i7-2600: 3% higher clock speed, hyperthreading, yet nearly 50% higher cost. Both have unlocked versions for only slightly higher cost.

i5-2400 v. i7-2600: 10% higher clock speed, hyperthreading, yet over 50% higher cost.

i5-2300 v. i7-2600: you should be looking at a i5-2400, the 2400 being significantly slower, yet costing about as much. If you want cheaper, look to dual-core i3 CPUs, and AMD X2 to X4.

The same price and performance spread may not have applied, if you got Nehalem-era CPUs. Likewise, if you are in a country that flattens out prices with taxes, the situation will look very different.

Ah yes, now that you mention it, I did lose an EVGA 8800 GTX once, card just bricked for some reason.

Replaced it with a $100 XFX 9600 GT that worked great for the price, then upgraded my rig to SLI 260's. That was a fun rig, but then I just had a ton of other problems that resulted in two HDD failures. Cards and everything else worked wonders tho, Crysis was a dream on it.