Before you waste money on AMD, check out the i5 by Intel. They are faster for the most part than the phenoms (especially for gaming), and very comparible in price. I got my i5 for 149.99$ at microcenter. The new 1156 motherboards are very cheap also in comparison to the older i7 boards.
I got a MB, 4gb 1600 DDR3 OCZ ram, and the i5 for 340$. MUCH better than anything you can build from AMD for that price, especially since AMD still uses DDR2 (if I remember correctly).
i5's overclock extremely well also :) I've had mine up to 3.6ghz on stock fan with absolutely 0 heating issues. They can go to 4.0ghz on air cooling with a nice heatsink and still run stable so I've read, but I'm to cheap to try it lol, like you I was looking for a budget PC to upgrade for gaming.
My old build was this:
Q6600 socket 939
2gb ddr2 Ram
8800GTS
ECS board
now I'm on:
i5 750
4gb ddr3 1600 ram
260 GTX core 216
Gigabyte Board
It is complete DAY AND NIGHT difference from my previous build, which could also run most games (as somebody else said) with nice settings, but it couldn't do things like AA at high resolutions, or even at low for that matter very well. The previous guy who says it runs close to max settings is lying if he says he was running AA.
Also I wouldn't go by newegg's pricing anymore, it seems my local stores are kicking there arse constantly.
The Halo francise is the most overrated bland game to ever hit the console market. It provides a bad name to all FPS that even showed effort at creating an original entertaining plot.
I probably have more ps3 games than you :/
