Profile of Budwise

But having more space on your SSD does make it faster, so why not get a bigger one?

SSD's dont spin and therefore dont have the same slow down issues of standard drives. They will slow down very slightly when they get near full due to garbage collection but not like a standard drive. IMO, if you have 20GB of free space you're good. If you only have 10GB free then id look at a bigger drive.

Does that apply for my motherboard then? (yes I'm a total pc nub)

Yes.

X79 has no benefit over Z77 for 95% of users. X79 is just much more expensive.

Fail Ami

Its the 21st not the 12th.

LGA2011 is a complete and utter waste of money. Its a server platform that shows little to no benefit vs 1155 for a workstation workload. In fact its slower than 1155 sometimes and the CPU's and Motherboards all cost quite a bit more than skt1155.

Easy build:
i7 3770K or i5 3570K

Asus Z77 Motherboard
Sabertooth/P8Z77-V Series

8GB of DDR3 1600 is plenty but get 16 if you want since its cheap as chips

There's a handful of really nice SSD's out there. Samsung/Crucial would be my first choices.

Video card is where you will want to invest a lot. Either AMD or Nvidia have great cards. I usually get the 2nd to the top of the line card since you usually get 95% of the performance for 20% off the cost. This means either a GTX 680/670 or a HD 7970 but I think a new gen of both of these are due out in Q1. I find it hard recommending getting the current gen since they've been out for 9 months already.

Power Supply is another area to get something solid. I recommend around a 750W unless you plan to overclock or get multi GPU's. Corsair is my brand of choice but there are other good ones.

lol, im a fan.