Going to Buy a Computer, Plan on Gaming. Please Help!

[Epoch]

disolitude said:

Here are my recomendations:

AMD Phenom X4 945 ~ 120-150 bucks
4 gb of ram ~ 100 bucks
Brand name 800 watt power supply ~ 80-100 bucks
Antec full tower case ~ 50 bucks

Now the decision for video card is most important as it will also determine which mobo to get.

For your needs I'd recomend and ATI 4870 + a motherboard that supports AMD AM2/3 socked and crossfire dual video card slots

or

Nvidia GTX260 + Nvidia certified mobo that does SLI (dual video card setup)

ATI advantage is that its cheaper

Nvidia advantage is that it supports 3D vision if you ever want to get in to 3D gaming on your PC.

Good advice, but 800W power supply ? Thats pretty high unless you are overclocking like crazy and running 2 video cards.

For a single video card 550W is plenty. 

Check out this thread, it is a fantastic guide for PC specs.

If you don't plan on building it yourself, you'll still get a good idea of what you should look for and need.  I recently built a pretty good PC for $1500 CAD after tax;

core i7, Radeon 5850, 8GB RAM, 1 TB HD.  You can get good dollar value if you build it yourself