Well, gaming is more important to me, so I'm going to fiddle around with the i5. How noticeable is the lesser performance of the Crucial MX100 compared to the Samsung 840 EVO by the way?
Very small in real world performance.
Is it worth saving $20?
The MX100 has newer 16nm flash. We don't know the reliability and longetivity of this new NAND flash. If you can spend the extra 20 dollars, get the EVO. If you don't plan to do major writes/reads to the drive daily, the MX100 should still be a great performer for the money.
Okay, I think this is my last question: is it worth it to get 16gb of ram at all right now?
If you like to have a lot of things open in the background(or like to have a lot of chrome tabs open), or are doing video rendering/editing, yes. Otherwise, 8GB will do just fine for gaming with maybe chrome and whatever else you might have open.
I'm ordering the parts now! Thank you all for the replies.