http://www.anandtech.com/show/4137/amds-gtx-560-ti-counteroffensive-radeon-hd-6950-1gb-xfxs-radeon-hd-6870-black-edition/5

The 6950 1GB trades games with the 560 Ti. If the games you like favour one over the other, choose that one. If one of them is significantly cheaper than the other, get that one. I'm not that great on current pricing, but a quick look on some Canadian websites shows the 560 Ti about $20 cheaper.

I was more saying, consider both, rather than recommending the Radeon. I don't think you care about the difference features, and average performance is similar, so it does come down to cost.

Hm, thank you, I will keep this in mind. They're pretty comparable in terms of heat and noise levels. This is not an easy decision!

Now I just need to wait for some Witcher 2 benchmarks....

If you care a lot about power consumption, are you sure you need such a high-powered card as the HD 6950 or 560 Ti? What resolution are you going to game at?

1080p, I figure. It's not power consumption so much as heat and noise.

Intel Sandy Bridge is faster than AMD processors. Just something to consider for gaming...price vs speed.

Other than power consumption, the only thing affecting heat and noise should be the particular cooling solution used on the card you choose (that varies among brands so I guess you're checking particular models of a 560 Ti for example).

For 1080p a HD 6850/6870 or equivalent on the Nvidia side might be enough, that cuts power consumption to 150 W from 200 W compared to the cards under discussion here, without losing much performance. The AnandTech link previously posted in the thread has some benchmarks of those cards as well.

Depends how quick you wanna play games, but I say just get anything with an AM3 board and just upgrade as you go I mean ATI isn't gonna be changing sockets anymore from what I know.  Though I ultimately say wait until the next set of consoles come around.  At that point onward you're not gonna have to change your CPU until the gen after that.

I just wanna confirm you're going 64-bit.  Otherwise, 4x2GB is too much, and a 1GB graphics card could actually hurt performance.

Well, only some AM3 motherboards will support BD. If you were going down that route you'd buy AM3 plus, but there is no guarantee that the second gen of BD would support that either.

Socket compatibility is a mess on both the Intel and AMD sides at the moment.

Obviously u should get a Radeon 6950 rather than the Geforce 560Ti. Faster for the same price and it's AMD instead of Nvidia.

The Core i5 2500K is overpowered for either of those GPUs but it's good as a future proof since you can switch GPU to a twice or three times as fast in a couple of years and still keep the CPU to feed it without a problem.
(id buy a Phenom II personally but that's it's because I don't like Intel)

Basically Khuutra you need to make a choice and ask yourself if you will keepthe whole package for 3-4 years or if you will want to go with the split strategy and upgrade the GPU in two years. Because in the first scenario the CPU is overpowered for the whole lifetime.