building a new comp...

Well that isn't a whole lot of money but I would recommend one of the following

if you wanna go somewhat big:

A Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 maybe, a 8800series card for the future, a decent mobo 108i or something like that, and 2gb of some DDR2 ram, Power supply it all with a 550W Antec TPII.

A cheaper builld might be

A AMD X2 series like the 4800, 2gb or DDR2 or 1 for now, the same power supply, and say a 7900GT card, although still I don't really recommend doing this even though it's what I have because of the options available

Well that isn't a whole lot of money but I would recommend one of the following

if you wanna go somewhat big:

A Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 maybe, a 8800series card for the future, a decent mobo 108i or something like that, and 2gb of some DDR2 ram, Power supply it all with a 550W Antec TPII.

A cheaper builld might be

A AMD X2 series like the 4800, 2gb or DDR2 or 1 for now, the same power supply, and say a 7900GT card, although still I don't really recommend doing this even though it's what I have because of the options available

Jagg3d

thats plenty of money to buy a great midrange pc w/o a monitor. Getting your mommy to buy everything isn't that great because

a: she buys bullcrapishly slow stuff

b: she doesn't know anything so i end up upgrading my whole pc just to be able to play stuff