Difficulty deciding... help?

Hey everyone. Signature lists what I currently have. My wife's 2008 macbook is out of warranty and plagued with issues, so I will be letting her inherit my 13" MBP here soon and will be looking into upgrading my 2009 iMac.

I do some light photoshop work, light video editing, ripping movies for media streaming and some light gaming. One of the games for example is Knights of the Old Republic, which lags pretty badly on my 2009 model at native resolution. I have a desktop that is a beast and used primarily for gaming, but there are some games on the App Store such as the one listed above that don't play well in Windows 7 so I resort to OSX.

I have been looking at the 21.5" iMacs again as I have a Dell U2711 monitor that I use as well - I have no need for two 27" screens. I was a little disappointed that the base 21.5" didn't have the option to add the 256GB SSD. So I will be closer to $1850 with educational discount rather than $1500 like I thought I would be since I need to step up to the next model (not including apple care). Was hoping not to spend that much.

So my question is... with the base 21.5" is it a total PitA to switch from the stock HDD to an aftermarket SSD if I bought an OCZ or OWC drive? Likewise, it doesnt seem like I would receive a giant increase in FPS upgrading to the 6770m GPU... or would I? I am trying not to allow myself to fall into the "well, i should probably just upgrade to XXX feature just in case" trap.

Any thoughts appreciated.

 

I thought about this and contacted the two retailers in our area. They both wont touch an aftermarket SSD install because of the issues with the thermal sensor.

 

Well, to anyone interested I went to the Apple store last night and picked up the base 21.5" iMac. I have not gotten around to test graphical improvements in some games that were lagging on the old system yet - but the i5 seems like a dramatic improvement.

As much as I wanted a SSD - I didn't want to go up to $1900 just to have the SSD in it. Worse case scenario I will hope for a thunderbolt > external SSD option someday.