New Computer Conundrum

So I have been recently been given the go ahead to purchase/build a brand new computer. Having done this in the past with my previous computer and also for a few computers for friends, I figured that this would be a fairly simple task.

Unfortunately I was wrong.

In the last few months there has been quite a lot of new specifications released, which make the simple comparison between X part and Y part not so easy any more, I'll explain...

My old computer was an Intel Core 2 Duo e-6600 with 6 GB of DDR2 memory (amongst other things). Comparing it say to an Intel Core 2 Duo e-8400 is a fairly trivial task, it's obvious that the e-8400 will be faster/better than its e-6600 counterpart.

However when specifying (read: browsing online stores and putting prices together) my latest machine I encountered a few areas of uncertainty, which CPU to get, which motherboard, which case etc...

The main problem that I encountered was with the release of SATA-3.0 standard and USB-3.0 standard, which with all new things can be difficult to dissect. Essentially the new standard allows USB devices and Hard-drives to run at much higher speeds, the downside being that (on some systems at least) this speed is shared with the graphics card (which if you are trying to play the latest games isn't exactly a good thing)

The next issue that I came across was with the Hard-drive(s), initially I thought I would just run 2x mechanical drives in a RAID-0 configuration, but with the price of Solid-State-Drives falling recently they present an interesting alternative. The specifications/speeds of SSD's are incredible but they are much more expensive than their mechanical brothers (i.e. $240 for 60GB vs $129 for 1000 GB)

In the past you had the option of 2 main CPU makers (AMD & Intel) and that was really the toughest choice, now days you have 2 CPU makers, 20 different variations on actual chips, 6-8 different memory speeds, 2 different Hard-drive technologies and that's just the tip of the iceberg...

I have to ask, in this circumstance is more choice better for the consumer or does it just lend itself to confusing specifications and difficulty in comparing these?