New PC-$500

Approx. Purchase:Christmastime

Budget: $520 after rebates

Usage: Gaming, lots of spreadsheets, surfing

Not Required: Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers

Bought on: Newegg.com

USA

AMD is preferred, will be overclocking a lot.

SLI/ Crossfire in the future maybe.

1600 x 1200 resolution

Would like a fairly nondescript case, having my buddy tag a mural-thing on it/ slapping some stickers on there.

You should start with this

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,3032.html

Do you need an OS?

Not sure how you feel about the new zambezi line, but this appears to be a good value for a quad core:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103996

You might get better gaming performance on a core i3 though. Also, for budget builds the main wildcard these days seems to be the expense of traditional hard drives because of the flooding in Thailand. For 500gb they're going for around 80 bucks. You might want to consider using an old drive or possibly a SSD.

So what I would recommend is first to figure out what kind of processor you want to build from... intel vs amd, and then from there you can see if you want to invest more in a nicer video card or other options.

does newegg charge you tax?

Since you have the 520 budget and you still need an OS and i'm not sure about tax, I think it'd start with the Athlon ii x3... good price on newegg and it can possibly unlock the 4th core and has shown to be a good overclocker.

~$68 athlon ii x3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103886

~$61 biostar motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813138324

~$29 gskill ripjaws 8gb memory http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820231428

~$139 sapphire 6870 video card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814102948

~39 OCZ modular 600w power supply (i own this, very nice) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817341017

~$17 samsung dvd burner http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6827151252

~$25 coolermaster hyper 212 plus great value for overclocking: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6835103065

This brings you to $378 after rebates, and not sure about sales tax. So that leaves you with $142 to worry about hard drives and an OS

cutting it close, but you could trim the prices on the video card and get a 6770 if the 6870 is too much