Soleron on 14 September 2008
Both Intel and AMD (and AMD and Nvidia) are reputable companies with good reputations. Base your decision entirely on price vs. performance.
I usually trust techreport.com with base builds. See http://techreport.com/articles.x/15381 for a good start. The "Grand Experiment" comes out to just over $1000 (you can strip the sound card to bring it under $1000). The CPU and GPU in that are top in their price range and also great value. AMD doesn't even sell any CPus at that price, and Nvidia can't compete with AMD's latest series.
