Soleron on 11 February 2009
I'm very confused now. You say you don't want to spend a lot more money for a little more performance, but then you want an "uber" CPU? Which is it? You can get 80% of the performance of the uber for about 33% of the price, OR you can build the best system ever.
For good value and max settings in all non-Crysis current games at your monitor resolution, a Phenom II X4 920 / Radeon HD4870 / 4GB DDR2 is probably the best choice.
For a no-limit uber system, the Core i7 965 / 2x GTX295 / 6GB DDR3 is the best system. That will give you about a 20% boost over the system above at about three times the price.
@Squillam: The GTX285 is not a good choice. For the vast majority of games, the HD4850 X2 is faster at a similar price.
