Is this good for gaming?

It's close to being a good gaming system, but the 7570 is a lower end card that won't run 1080p on high settings. Also, the 300W Power supply it includes won't power an upgrade card.

That was a $950 computer. I think you could do a lot better looking at one of the gaming builds at cyberpowerpc. I think we need to get you to at least a Radeon 7850 or GTX660 graphics card to run games at high settings on 1080p.

It's currently $500 at tiger direct. Would I be able to swap out the psu at a later time and put in a better card then?

The games he would be playing are to intensive for the 7570, you would need to upgrade a few parts from that point. If you have ~ a 1000$ budget you can build something super sweet at the same price. I would definitely look into making your own pc if the option is available, it's for your son have some bonding time with him creating a computer together, plus it isn't to hard.

Oh, I checked newegg on the price. $499 is not bad at all.

Yes you can swap out parts later, it looks like a fairly standard case.

It is capable of running games as is, you will just have to choose lower resolutions, like 720p instead of 1080p.

I'm also trying to keep whole deal with monitor and low cost speakers at or below $750.

I wish I could figure out if that graphics card had ddr5 or ddr3. The latter might not play very many new games well. If it is ddr5, then you should be fine on 720p like I said above.

Are there any systems out there that any of you could suggest for my price range? Its a Christmas present and if i were to build it i would probably want to have more time since this would be my first build and i'm not real comfortable with doing it for his major gift.

I should add that i live outside of Houston and have a Micro Center, Fry's, and a Compusa close by.

^Building it takes a matter of hours if all parts are verified working. Just throwing it out there. Those of us who've done it before can turn parts into a fully functional computer with everything installed within half a day - if all you're doing is piecing it together and installing Windows, then a few youtube videos and you'll be good to go.

DarkSable i hear ya and i've read alot of the threads on here and know that would be the way to go but i just can't bring myself to doing it at this time.