Recommendations for a "mid-range" but super nice build.
$225 Intel i5-2500K Amazing CPU for the money, and easily overclockable if you have the desire.
$180 Asus P8Z68-V/Gen3 ATX motherboard (Intel Z68 Chipset)
$74 2x 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600 Mushkin RAM kits, for a total of 16GB of RAM.
$260 MSI HD6950 2GB video card
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$739 for a pretty dang beastly system.
Just add drives, case and PSU. Do you need 16GB of RAM? Probably not. But for $74, my argument is; why not?
Some justifications: Intel is currenly leading the performance charge, both in Instructions per clock, as well as peformance/watt. I.e. Intel CPU's are more efficient and overall "faster" at a given clock speed than AMD CPU's. This doesn't even take into consideration the hardware-accelerated AES-NI instructions, (AES encryption at around 2-4GB/s throughput), hardware transcoding for video transcoding (say converting one of your DVD's to an iphone compatible format), etc.
AMD on the other hand is currently top of the charts when it comes to performance for the money on the Video card side of things. The HD6xxx series is currently (in my opinion) far and away better than the nVidia 5xx series.
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