I bought my parts on Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend. The whole thing came out to be around $900 before the rebates, but there were some really good deals that weekend. I think this rig should be able to run most games. I went the Intel/Nvidia route. Intel is raping AMD pretty bad right now, and from what I read, ATI cards run super hot. Also, 9800 GTX+ is supposed to run much cooler than 9800 GTX. - CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - CPU Fan: Blue Orb II CL-P0257 - MD: EVGA 123-YW-E175-A1 LGA 775... 750i SLI ATX - Video: EVGA 512-P3-N879-AR GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB - RAM: G.SKILL 4GB DDR2 (2 x 2GB) - HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS (2 x 500GB for RAID 0) - PSU: COOLMAX CUG-950B 950W - CD/DVD: LG 6X Blu-ray DVD-ROM - Case: SILVERSTONE Black SST-LC17-B You probably won't need the blue ray disc player, and you can probably reuse your old case. Those should shave off another $200 or so. If you're a serious gamer, I would consider another 9800 GTX+ for SLI. If SLI isn't the thing for you, you can get a cheaper motherboard, one with just single PCIe slot but I wanted the option to do SLI later. I got my parts after checking newegg, directron, mwave, and tigerdirect. I went with whoever had the cheapest price. Don't forget to check the combo deals on NewEgg.