On the Fence again between AMD and intel

Hi All
I am a newbie member but not new to the site.
I am looking for a second opinion

I am looking to build my 50 yr old Bro his second computer..
He currently has a second hand 3.0ghz P4
does the trick eventually even he is finding it slow now....I found it slow when he got it ..lol

He wants to keep it to 600 tax in out the door.
I want to build the best bang for his buck so he wont need another puter till 55 at least.

He has a nvidea 220 pcie vid card now so dont need another vid card.
He isnt a big gamer online, just poker and stuff like that but no first person shooters or anything like that.

But he wants to get a lcd tv and put his computer on it as well be able to play tunes while he plays poker.
He burns odd CD now as well and basically cant do anything untill done.

So I have been checking out the E6500 with a decent mobo and mem so I can give a mild overclock. for a bout 550 out the door.
Then i realized for about 50 bux more I could set him up with a G6950 rig.

Well now my local computer store has a
Athlon X4 635
Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H AM3 Motherboard
OCZ Gold DDR3 1600MHz 4GB
OCZ Solid 2 30GB SSD
bundle for 350, with a Case p/s and windows 7 I can have him a Quad core and a solid state drive.
Prolly run circles around my $1600 i5 well not for gamin.
He has a second hard drive in his other machine with music and stuff on that we planned to move over any way,
so as long as 30gb is big enough for win7 which i have been reading it is, I am having a hard time passing up
the AMD.
My last machine b4 my i5 was a 4400+ and now it is my server I have had no issues with so going AMD doesnt bother me.
Again biggest bang for the buk!

This bundle is only on until july4

so wat I want to know is wat you think
I think the processor is lots for him I just have no SSD experience.
Does anyone have win7 on an OCZ Solid 2 30GB SSD and can give me some real life performance examples
like boot time app launches stuff like that.

Another question is the mobo Ive always been an ASUS or EVGA guy but I have read good things Gigabyte.
But I find alot of negative stuff about that mobo on net.
I do take alot with a grain of salt as alot of people dont do their home work when assembling pc's so they don't work all the time the first time
and some people well should be buying HP's or Dells
Does any one have this mobo in use?
Are you able to OC all I want to do is run the mem at 1600mhz which should give me around a 3.4 oc i believe.

After looking at Benchmarks it appears the X4 635 performs as well as the i3 and for somethings as well as some i5's
so hard not to consider this bundle.
Any advise or thoughts are welcome
I think it would be cool to give him a machine that boots in seconds instead of minutes like his current one.
And he can be my SDD test bed.

Thanks