The best performance per $ would have to be an i5-750, they are cheap as hell and outperform all core 2 quads except the extreme edition, and they also outperform AMD's best, they can overclock to 4ghz on stock cooler, ( although I wouldn't recommend it ) the p55 motherboards for them are extremely cheap too, I have to recommend gigabyte, they are extremely reliable and have good support and frequent bios updates and driver updates.
The Antec 900 mentioned above is a bad case, the antec 300 which is supposedly a lesser case has dust filters 1x140mm fan inbuilt, 1x120mm fan inbuilt, and room for 3 more 120mm fans, it' also very cheap.
Any i5 or i7 requires DDR3, so you will have to buy new ram, DDR3 is fairly cheap now, the i5-750 needs 2 sticks of ram for dual channel, definately get 4gig ( 2x2gig sticks ) 2 gig total isn't enough these days.
If you want a budget video card that will play all games very well an ati 5850 is the way to get, the best price/performance card going right now, the 5870 is overprice, and even though i'm an nvidia fanboy, I cannot recommend any of their products it would just be insane right now, ati=cheap + DX11, nvidia = overpriced, no DX11.
Nvidias new cards are coming out soon though so if you wait a month or 2 the prices of the ati cards will have plummeted, so that would be the best time to buy a GPU, ram and cpus aren't getting any cheaper though so you may as well get them while their cheap.
The i5-750 is slightly cheaper than the amd 965 and the motherboards for it are aroung the same price or cheaper as well.
As above, 550watt minimum PSU corsair is a great brand, massive warranty as well, 7 years on my corsaid HX-850, as for RAM, OCZ has a lifetime warranty on all their ram.
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