do you have any technically inclined friends you would trust? You might be able to get a little more bang if you ask for help.

edit: are there any college kids where you live? you can usualy scrounge up a couple advertising tech support ad they work for ramen.

LMAO!

I recently moved to a new city, so unfortunately I can't exactly call on my friends in this situation.

Your idea intrigues me. I should put a bag of ramen on a string to lure in comp sci majors at the local university, and then promise them said food when they helped me build it. Genius.

I think my issue is that I just want to be sure I can play the damn game. The comp I use now is a few years old, and whenever I play the C&C games, it usually slows down or freezes after about 15-20 mins of playing. If video cards were named like Video Card V1.0, V2.0, etc., I could figure out which one I need.

Instead, we have NVIDIA 44bajillion which is worse than the Athlon 32CSI, you know? There needs to be an easy to follow list not made for someone who's spent their entire lives building computers.

You really should consider just building it yourself. Modern PC parts are basically Legos, and it's impossible to screw something up unless you can't follow some very clear directions.

At a $600-$700 budget, you can easily build something that'll run C&C3 and RA3 at max settings at a pretty high resolution. I'd recommend a tri- or quad-core Athlon II, Micro-ATX AM3 mobo, Antec Mini P180 (there's really no reason not to get this case no matter what your budget), and 4 GB RAM as a starting point. For the video card, what's your monitor resolution? If it's anything less than 1920x1080 or so, you can probably get away with using a Radeon 4850 or something similarly cheap.