I'm not actually building this rig, but I thought it'd be fun to try to build the best gaming rig as possible for the least amount of dough. Yes, I know this has been done before, but I mainly wanted to do this just to prove to myself that you can build a PC that's better than a PS3 for less than the price. However, my problem lies in this: CPU vs Video card. Obviously you cant throw an AMD64 2800+ and two 7950GTXs in SLI and expect the best results, due to bottlenecking. Right now in the shopping cart I've got an AMD Operton 148 and an X1950XTX. I'm guessing that that would cause bottlenecking. But since I'm trying to fit it under $600, I need to choose a less expensive videocard to afford a more powerful processor. What CPU/GPU combo would give me the best results when you only have $322.56 left to spend on a CPU and a Videocard for a $600 PC?

This is what I've got chosen so far:
Case
Power Supply
1GB RAM
2.2GHz CPU
Motherboard
80GB Harddrive
CD/DVD Burner

These are the CPU and GPU that I've got in my shopping cart right now, and I'm wondering what CPU/GPU I shoudl get to have the best performance w/o bottlenecking:
X1950Pro videocard
2.2GHz CPU


So far, all of this omes to a total of $597.42.

C2D 6400 and a 7900GT

yeh e6400 for proc. the rest wont matter that much. get the best vid card you can

Even with the cheapest 7900GT, it's still about $100 over the price limit.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814150150
I'll loan ya $60.........lol